Herding Packets

I often work remotely on customers’ infrastructures with their remote hands on-site. When a small office or branch changes ISPs or IP blocks, I occasionally find myself in a position where I have to change the only public IP address of a device like a branch office router or firewall, with no out-of-band management. The trouble with this is fairly obvious (on a Cisco device): by changing the IP address via which I am accessing the device over SSH, I will lose my own management session to it. Once the management session is lost, I can’t update the default route, and now the device is broken and I get to walk the on-site hands (who are often not very Cisco-literate) through changing a default route.