Just one misclick ...

Well, that was some fun hour or so.

See, here I was, trying to figure out how to make it possible to connect from office WLAN (which is kinda limited, for a reason) to my desktop for testing purposes.

So I am browsing through the firewall settings, trying some things, and ...

...Shit. Everything just stops working. That last setting (some bridge rule) apparently was Very Bad Idea.

As pretty much nothing works (and remaining live interface happens to be DMZ, from which I can't do anything anyway.)  So only option I have is to hit factory reset in the router. And start desperately rebuilding everything from scratch. All the settings, all the firewall and forwarding rules, everything.

And I realize I have absolutely no recollection on how to do it. The setup has been there for some two years now, virtually untouched aside some minor tweaks here and there. At this point I'm getting a bit nervous, especially since I have no internet access - until I manage to reconfigure it correctly.

This isn't a very pleasant feeling.

But then a small memory hits me. Last time I did this, didn't I make notes?

Yes I did. Not very clear ones - I'm quite certain that no one but me could rebuild the setup from those - but they were just sufficient enough to allow me to set up everything quickly. First outbound access (damn Cisco boxes provided by ISP make that annoyingly difficult), then inbound services one by one.

And now we're back. At least some of the obsolete port forward tweaks that were needed at some point for testing got thrown out too.

I think there is a lesson here somewhere, but guess I'm not seeing it, not right now...