Dear Fedi friends,
On this 500th day of my self-hosting adventures I would like to report that it feels good to eat some humble pie and remember that at my core I am still a newbie.
My facepalm moment of the day: after receiving an urgent email from my VPS host about a critical Linux kernel vulnerability that had been found - urging me to update my system ASAP - I simply could not log into my VPS with Terminal. Hostinger recently changed things - instead of automatically logging you in from the Dashboard, it is now asking you to log in with your username and password. No problem! (or so I thought)
I remembered that for security reasons YunoHost disables root login by default for all new installations. Easy: I will simply use the YunoHost username and password I had created during the post-install - what I typically use to log into the web admin every day.
Well: nothing worked. I double-checked and even updated my password in the web admin.
And then... and just then... 30 minutes in... I remembered* that I had changed my SSH port to beef up security. So instead of doing ssh username@ServerAddress I had to use ssh -p PortNumber username@ServerAddress. Duh!
*to add insult to injury, it's not like I suddenly remembered this key fact. No. I saw a note in my password manager entry for the YunoHost installation that read "changed the SSH port to _"
No way to get those precious 30 minutes back but a powerful reminder that 500 days in, I am still very much a rookie - with infinite admiration for REAL sysadmins.
Happy May 1st!
Elena
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