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.] [1]
So I'm sitting on the private porch at The Red House Inn [2] when I attempt to check my email. I can't.
You see, I use mutt [3] 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 [4] 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 [5] to block ssh attempts after five times [6], 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 [7] 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 (Virtual Private Network) 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.
[1] /boston/2018/09/28/Porch.jpg
[2] http://www.brevardbedandbreakfast.com/
[5] https://github.com/spc476/syslogintr
[6] https://github.com/spc476/syslogintr/blob/master/modules/ssh-iptables.lua
![[1] /boston/2018/09/28/Porch.jpg](/gemini.conman.org/boston/2018/09/28/Porch.jpg){kind=link}