^This^ ^is^ ^a^ ^joke,^ ^I^ ^didn't^ ^really^ ^lock^ ^myself^ ^out^
good reason to take a day out, will tell it to my boss.
Happened to me once. Had a little Pi at my parent's house and that was a nice excuse to visit them.
Except when you get there and don’t want to talk or do all the meeting and greeting until you know the server still works.
even worse. I regularly have to get up out of my chair and go down 2 stairs.
Also this took a while to find, but : https://sourceforge.net/p/shorewall/svn/HEAD/tree/branches/4.2/Samples/one-interface/shorewall.conf
ADMINISABSENTMINDED=Yes
Is an actual setting in the config for the (now apparently unmaintained) Shorewall Firewall software/tool for linux.
If I remember correctly, it always checks on firewall rule changes if there is an active connection on port 22, and adds a special rule at the end to maintain that connection.
They don't build them like they used to anymore.
They don't build them like they used to anymore.
Well if we did, the way it works would be by telling a chatbot to enable ssh on port 22 at the end.
Doing this is a right of passage.
Believe it or not, "rite" is the, uh, right, word here.
Messing up the spelling is a wrong of passage.
You have a right to pass once you've done this rite of passage.
Believe it or not, straight to jail
Before you make a change, do this in a screen-session:
sleep 300 && iptables-restore old_fw_rules.bak
permission denied
fuuuu
Real servers have lights out management and management networks.
I'd rather plug in a screen with VGA than deal with HPE iLO 4
Serial terminal servers (sometimes called terminal console servers) are a thing for a reason.
To be honest, HPE iLO 6 isn't too bad, if you're using the GUI. It's the API that remains really broken in many places.
I keep a Windows 2008 w Java 6 VM on ice for administering old Java console shit like that.
The VM is unsafe as hell. Completely virgin unpatched. The only protection is that I don't give it a gateway or dns, and I shut it down when its not in use.
And it works. Old Java shit can still be used.
Almost the same thing happened to me. I accidentally fucked up the internet connection in my home while in Japan, and I had to video call my mom to have her fix it. It was a pain for both of us, but thankfully it went rather smoothly. Thank you mom!
Do you mind explaining the details? I’m trying to learn as much as possible!
What's really fun is hearing "oh shit" from the UPS maintenance tech followed by darkness and silence.
Classic.
Love Hetzner. If something like that were to happen to me they can hook up a remote console accessible through their web interface.
Many hosting providers have a remote console feature.
Console
Fuck, that is really good wordplay.
Don't practically all commercial hosting providers provide remote console access?
This seems a combo of an extremely newb mistake in an extremely unusual scenario - worthy of Gru I guess.
Physical, on premises servers are still a thing.
Yes, I also used to run an "on premise" server - in my kitchen, not 500km away. I sometimes might need to admin it remotely, but never critical setup work.
And the meme makes it sound like they have to drive there specifically to fix it, like nobody is actually living nearby.
I mean it's a pretty realistic scenario. I happened to be the unlikely remote hands for the company I work for just a few weeks ago.
Company: an industrial cleaning company with about 1500 AD users and about 8000 employees, historically had 2 corporate offices, currently has three as it's transitioning one corporate office across the country
Server and mistake in question: old admin who's no longer with the company setup the ESXI 6.0 cluster in the server room at the office without documenting the root password to access it. This cluster happens to host the companies critical services including AD so being unable to access the host has been blocking the office migration. Old admin had also not fixed the ESXI backups which have been broken for over 3 years so no backups to restore from. Also the out of band access to the servers was never correctly setup
I happening to be close to this office and having IT experience was poked to go in and with physical access to modify the shadow file and set the root password to be blank. Had I not been available they would have had to fly someone in from the office 2000 miles away or hire a very expensive local contractor to come in after hours to do the same thing
Well, I have my server running in my parents basement, because they have fiber, and I don't.
It's not quite a 500km drive, but still a long enough distance for this scenario to be a major inconvenience.
But since I have wireguard running on their router though this specific scenario is not something that could happen to me
Yeah, all the ones I've used had remote access
Most secure box is the one that does nothing.
Since that happens to the best of us, I envision writing a wrapper script around {n,}pfctl that asks for confirmation upon detecting that you're logged in via ssh through a specific port AND detecting that the new rules would block that port.
I'll always be grateful for the firewalls like OpenWRT that will automatically revert any changes if you don't log back in after a few minutes (at least on the web interface). I'm not proud of how many times that's saved me.
That the slrpnk.net admins in the picture?
This is the NetAdmin's problem. And he's got 3 ways to get into the datacenter, so he goddamn well better have an answer that doesn't involve airfare. Worst case, he's gotta use remote hands, but that would be embarrassing, and I'd not let him forget it. Nobody forgives me when I screw up a server cluster, so he gets no latitude when he takes a datacenter offline.
I try to remember to always open two SSH connections when altering iptables or the ssh config - just in case
Does it actually happen to people? All servers I worked with both had a back door (or two), and someone at the data centre (during work hours at least) you could contact in an emergency.
I guess some smaller companies might have simpler setups they self-host
Most data centers have some kind of service where you can request a KVM to be connected to the server. It's not instant as an actual human has to do so but a lot sooner than another human driving long distance. I guess in this case, it's a mid size company that is big enough to have multiple locations yet small enough to still manage to use on-premise infra instead of data centers.
i feel that. Hetzner support has a special place in my heart
Rescue mode with networking, mount drive, make changes and reboot.
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