Well, today hasn’t gone as planned. Disclaimer: I rarely actually have a plan, so there is probably a more accurate way of phrasing that. I’m sticking with it for now though. And, disclaimer #2: It really didn’t go THAT bad. Last Monday I discovered our septic tank was full, and not draining properly. Now that, people, THAT was a “rough start to a week.” Ewww. Anyway, this is a new week so I’ll skip the gory details of that debacle. Today, I planned to mow and finish up the power washing project that was started over the weekend. As I was sitting on the couch building up my energy for this ambitious undertaking, I got an email, “failed login attempt to your server.” Huh, that’s odd. Back to my crossword puzzle. Then I got another email, and then another. I was pretty quickly inundated with these emails, so I had to interrupt my morning routine and look into it. Yeah, a good number of addresses over in Iran were trying a bunch of random logins to my webserver. C’mon guys, I have nothing to do with current international affairs, don’t take out your anger on my poor little server. So, I set about figuring out the firewall on my router. It seems that, having owned that router for the better part of 10 years, I would be familiar with the firewall set up, but I’ve never had to make more than a few simple changes to it. Not too hard it turns out, and I even learned a few “quirks” about it that I wasn’t familiar with. I blocked the dozen or so addresses that were pummeling me, went back to my puzzles, and then started to wonder: How did they connect to my server in the first place? Odd. I don’t have any services directly exposed to the internet. Everything goes through a proxy. If you don’t know the exact address, you just go into never-never land. For instance, if you enter “recipes.pkenagy.synology.me,” your connection gets routed to the proxy, it knows that name, and forwards it to the correct place. If you were, however, to enter “cookbook.pkenagy.synology.me,” it doesn’t know that address so you just get an error back. (Or hit the pkenagy.com site, also a benign outcome.) Hmmmm, time to go over my proxy settings. Well, come to find out, “everything” doesn’t go through the proxy. My photo app is set up to go directly to the server it lives on. It’s a handy little app that backs up our phone pictures automatically, I quite like it. Now, why did I set it up differently than everything else? I really cannot imagine. Got it working a long time ago and then forgot about it? Had trouble running it through the proxy, and took the low road instead? That memory is long flushed I guess. I set it up to route like everything else and it seems to work fine, although I still haven’t closed the “bad” setup yet. For one thing, the logins were nowhere close to actually getting access. Not to be overconfident, but I really don’t see anything figuring out a 16 character random password, not to mention a random username. And what happens if it eventually DOES figure out my login? Somebody steals pictures of my dinner from last night? Yeah, don’t care. All the same, I don’t want it to succeed and then find out differently, so I’ve definitely got an eye on it until I get around to a final fix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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