Posted 30-Aug-2026 in Technology

Security Caveat: Locked out of my server while traveling

I'm still on my self-hosting kick as of late, while also questioning my life choices around hosting my own git forge. The last week or so has included what appears to be a DDoS attack rather than some coordinated scraping effort by a sketchy LLM company.

Open source will prevail, even if I'm being stubborn about giving in and setting up Anubis. WordPress has been its own other adventure, but this isn't meant to be a post about those security caveats. I'll save those for another week.

The current dilemma is that I'm far from home, ~30 hours away up in Rhode Island. I'm sitting at Audrey's Coffee House & Lounge, where it was a bit too early to order a BLT.

As I sat down to knock out a quick blog post, I realized very quickly that I didn't think things through as well as I had thought. I keep my servers pretty well hardened, including but not limited to limiting access to certain services / ports to specific IP addresses.

This tends to not be much of a problem. I do a lot of work from the house, which in itself is a problem I want to remedy in the near future. I also boss agents around remotely, but they are all homebodies as well.

Since I like to stay as close to the server as possible, I try to not introduce managed services except where I feel it's absolutely necessary. In this scenario, I use iptables via the ufw command. I don't run a large enough fleet that I'd feel like leveraging Linode's firewall would be beneficial.

Path of least resistance today would be to simply compose a blog post and get it live when I'm back home. Could probably just ask one of my friendly robots to take the markdown file and get it out there for me too.

But alas, I would prefer to figure out how to pull this off, then blog about it. All while thinking through alternatives so future Josh can look back at this post and ask, "so why didn't you actually do anything you talked about in this post?"

This dance probably looks about the same with most modern VPS hosting providers, but my story revolves around Linode:

1. Panic
2. Remember I'm a problem solver
3. Also remember that I wasn't sure what to blog about today, and the universe has decided to give me a topic
4. Log into Linode
5. Use the web hosted shell to connect
6. Add my current nomadic IP address to the allow list
7. Push and pull accordingly
8. Remember to remove the IP address

Nothing too crazy.

A bastion instance wouldn't solve anything here, as that server should also limit access by IP address. Using Linode's managed firewall would yield the same issue, but adding the IP address would be done directly in the web interface rather than on the server itself.

Where my head is at is setting up a VPN, but that feels extremely heavy, as I would need to always be connected to access my servers. Maybe it's a smaller price to pay if I'm working out of the house more often, or I perhaps go with a hybrid model where my home IP always gets access, otherwise I use the VPN.

Or I go with my default motion when I encounter a problem for the first time, just wait and see. If this continues to be an issue, I'll have more data to make a decision from. If not, that's great too as I have no shortage of side quests to occupy my time already.

:wq