Previously, the ssh connection got stuck when first loading the nftables
ruleset. I now found the reason for this: conntrack was not active
before loading the ruleset, so there was no conntrack entry for the ssh
connection. This means the traffic was not matched by 'ct state
established', and the other output rules did not allow the traffic. To
fix this, we can load a ruleset at boot which uses conntrack; this
ensures that conntrack is already enabled when loading the actual
ruleset over ssh.
The laptops owned by SOI have 8 GB of RAM, and live systems running on
them sometimes run out of memory. To mitigate this, find and enable the
swap partition of the installed OS on the internal SSD.
Jan Schär