Can you confirm that it’s only the taskbar that freezes? Do any other DE components (e.g. app launcher (shortcut meta + f2 by default)) work or do they freeze/not respond as well?
You could check various logs for errors:
/var/log/syslog or dmesg)journalctl -xeu $UNITNAME; e.g. journalctl -xeu sddm.service)Which DE are you talking about? It sounds like KDE/Plasma but you didn’t specify.
It’s a mixed bag. Personally I wouldn’t use a non-standard port.
Consider that port numbers under 1024 are Privileged Ports. You would either have to make sure that no other privileged service is running on the port you want to use for SSH when using another privileged port or you need to make sure that no unprivileged program tries to use the same port as your SSH service when using a non-privileged. Overall it adds a bit of overhead and possible headaches for barely any gain.
Fail2ban should work with a different port without any further configuration but it might not.
You would need to specify the new port when using ssh (using the -p$PORT option). Just keep in mind that security through obscurity is not considered secure in itself. You could instead consider a service like fail2ban that automatically blocks connections from certain sources depending on your set parameters.
What @StarkZarn said is correct. Just one more thing: Did you reload/restart the sshd service after changing the configuration? If so you should be good.
There is no reason to “pick a side”. Situations like this aren’t usually black and white.
As others already did I also would challenge your (purely) conservative tag. One of the most prominent “features” of current conservatives is to remove support and even legal standing of non-traditional families.
Do you believe that family should have all the same rights, protections and support your “traditional” family has?
I would hardly call it your fuck up. You wanted to back up the data manually and were told not to - that’s on your supervisor/boss/whoever called the shots. Not on you.
Did you install any non-standard drivers? If your system has an nVidia GPU bumblebee, nouveau and the closed-sourced driver all can cause this issue.