The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Friday, September 28, 2018

An inadvertent lock-out, Brevard edition

Bunny and I are taking it easy on the first day of vaction. The weather is nice—sun is out, temperature is mid-70s, and there's the sound of the neighbor mowing his rather sizable lawn.

[Nothing like a private porch to spend a late summer afternoon (yes, I know it's technically autumn right now). You wish you were here.]

So I'm sitting on the private porch at The Red House Inn when I attempt to check my email. I can't.

You see, I use mutt to read my email. It runs directly on my email server, but to log into my email server, I have to first log into my home system due to filtering of ssh attempts by the hosting company (which doesn't really bother me all that much). But I too, have some filtering going on at home. I programmed my own syslog daemon to block ssh attempts after five times, regardless of time between attempts, or, as it turns out, regardless of sucessful attempts!

Because I left my iPad at home, I'm having to type my password. And due to the keyboard I'm using (it's not a Model M keyboard and therefore by default, this keyboard sucks) I incurred a few failed log in attempts.

Oops.

Well, that sucks! I thought. Wait! I know! I can log into work over The Corporation's VPN to my workstation there, and from there I can log into home and fix the situation. The problem became logging into the VPN.

And now I have two problems.

I called a fellow cow-orker, D, but he did not have the information I needed to configure the VPN, but as I was working on it, the idea came that all I really needed was a different Wi-Fi network to log in from.

And then I noticed my iPhone next to me.

It has a “personal hotspot” feature.

“Oh!” I said.

A few minutes later, and I had no problems.

Obligatory Picture

[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]

Obligatory Contact Info

Obligatory Feeds

Obligatory Links

Obligatory Miscellaneous

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