That being said, the first PC to get the upgrade was my work PC (thanks Mr. Virus man!).  Amazingly, the install went incredibly smooth, and all of my old files remained intact.  Many programs had to be reinstalled, sure, but that’s par for the course.  Very nicely done though, as I didn’t even have to consider where to get my drivers as the install took care of that all for me.  Good job, MS, good job.

Net was my new home PC, the Acer Aspire Revo 3610.  I could go on for days about how cool this little box is, but I won’t right now… that’s for another post.  Sure, this box came with Win7 already on it, but it was bloated as all hell, so I wiped the disk clean and installed a fresh copy.  Glorious.

To top it all off, the Windows 7 interface is nice.  I like it.  It makes sense, and most importantly it works.  I never had the problems with Vista others had, and I’m not having any problems now.  Must be my awesome personality.  I don’t get bugs. (HA!)

Shifting over to anti-virus programs now: TrendMicro is ace with me.  It’s not like I kept the install disk around all these years from when I first got Internet Security 2006, but who cares… you don’t need it.

I got a 3-license kit back in the day, and TM knows this.  I can log into their site, download the software (personalized with a slipstreamed serial key! w00t!), and install it in a matter of minutes.  “OH NOES!” I hear you say… “WHAT IF YOUR 3 LICENSES ARE ALREADY ACTIVATED?!?”  Well, first off stop showting, and second: that also doesn’t matter.  Once the install completes, you can transfer the license to your new PC from your old without ever bothering to turn on the old pc.  This is a great idea, and it works very well.

I ended up driving out to where my server is colocated at 8pm last night because my server wasn’t reaponding. I had recently installed APF (advanced policy firewall) and BFD (brute force detection) and wad confident in it’s functionality. Note: I installed and tested it while away from home.

Geeky stuff: APF is a CLI Frontend for iptables. You can deny/allow IP addresses with simple commands. Pair it with BFD and what you have is a nice little security system that scans server logs every few minutes looking for repeated failed logins and other suspicious activity and automatically blocks access to the offending IP (and tells you what it’s done in a nicely formatted email. End of geeky stuff.

Once I had it up and running I walked away confident in the security of my server. I knew of a few IPs that had been hacking away at me for months, so it was only a matter of time before the emails came telling me they were blocked. I added a few manually just to get the feeling for it. Happy with myself I went out with my lovely wife for dinner and a movie.

Then I tried to access my website from home…

No http access, no ssh, no FTP, and no reply on pings. Shit. I call the office and have them reboot my server. Nothing.

I only live about 10 miles away so I drove out to take a look. Looks like it’s running… Better reboot again to make sure it was done right. A few minutes later and we’re back in action! I head home.

Wake up at 6am. No response on my site or email. No FTP. No ssh. DAMMIT!

After a few cups of coffee it dawns on me to try something. I Vpn into my desktop pc at work and pull up my website. Works fine. Try it again from my local browser, fail.

A feeling starts to nag at me.

I use my remote desktop to SSH into the server. Success.

The feeling gets stronger.

I disable the firewall…

Everything magically works again.

The feeling begins to redden my cheeks.

I check the firewall rules.

Out of the eight IP adresses I manually denied, my home ip was first on the list.

The day before I installed the firewall I had forgotten that I had changed my password. There were several failed login attempts due to this.

That feeling? Stupidity. I has it.