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.]](/2018/09/28/Porch.jpg "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.
