The something today is me
My SSH is set up to use a different port and login by key only no passwords. I then added to my firewall a rule that any attempt to connect on ports 22 or 23 would add the IP to a blacklist with a timeout of one day. Any further attempt by that IP to connect on any port would reset the timeout back to 24 hours. It's all logged and I have spent many happy hours running through the log seeing what other ports these miscreants attempt.
All well and good until today. I have just returned after a year in the far east, and today still feeling jetlagged, I fired up my desktop computer, not used in just over a year and clicked on the SSH client icon to connect so that I could do my regular log checking but it would not connect, I did not look at the port, but remembered I had changed the keypair a few months ago. So transferred the key across from my laptop, still no joy. Ran windows diagnostics, no response from remote host, pings, nothing. Email, nothing, website nothing.
Panic started to set in, could not even get in through XEN, though that should have worked.
I used my laptop tethered still to my phone and was in straight away. Different IP. Yes I had locked myself out for 24 hours.
In the meantime I had sent a panic email to support. Sorry Andy.
It was a matter of minutes once the penny had dropped to get on the laptop and delete my home IP from the blacklist
Such a silly elementary mistake
So idiot of the day is...
Keith