skarnet.org will be down until further notice - it may take up to 10 days (!)

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

That was way faster than expected! Some person read my emergency ticket sent last night (from logged out), and I seem to have been convincing enough because they restarted the server for me, and now everything is working again. 🥳

Guess I won't have these 10 days of forced vacation.

Now to take measures so that it doesn't happen again...

[navi@social.vlhl.dev]

@ska i guess "please restart this vps that is hang anyway" is a easier ask to "give me access to this account"

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@navi Absolutely. I had asked to either send a recovery code to my gmail account, or reboot the server. They rebooted the server. Totally fair.

[lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me]

@ska @navi Also out of curiosity now that it's resolved, how did it hang?

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@lanodan @navi https://git.skarnet.org/cgi-bin/cgit.cgi/s6-linux-init/commit/ - not pasting the permanent URL to avoid people getting caught by my LLM blocker, the commit id is 43394581bb3106633c8802b378a7f2e6e53b352a

(Edit: add the commit id)

[lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me]

@ska @navi Heh done similar mistakes quite few times ^^

(Part of why sometimes I boot in read-only mode via qemu before rebooting)

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@lanodan @navi I never have problems booting thanks to the static guarantees of s6-rc, whenever I have an issue it is shutting down because after some living, the state may be different from what I assumed it would be.

But I'm learning, and incrementally fixing assumptions about state, this is only the latest case - and hopefully the last one.

[lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me]

@ska @navi Makes me wish I could trade, could always force a shutdown, while booting up when it's broken it's broken.

[mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org]

@ska @navi yes, spread. No, not Googlemail.

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@lanodan @navi You can always force a shutdown until it's on a remote VPS and the shutdown worked just well enough to kill everything including your sshd and your emergency getty and leave you with a brick and you're logged out of the VPS administrative account and the 2FA codes are sent to the brick.

(Edit: accuracy)

[anachronistjohn@zia.io]

@ska@social.treehouse.systems @navi@social.vlhl.dev Having a backup MX or a backup DNS server would give options. While mail often can't be run on residential lines, DNS usually can.

A backup MX will receive and store email to be forwarded, and you can just look directly in the mail queue to get the auth code, for instance.

I completely agree that companies' ideas about two factor are broken, are often added without asking and without configuration, and can be highly problematic during emergencies. At least you're here, sharing with others, so others can consider whether they might be in the same scenario should a problem occur.

[ska@social.treehouse.systems]

@AnachronistJohn @navi that's the point of the thread: so others can learn from my misadventure

Setting an external secondary DNS server is something I have thought about, obviously, but the answer was always "not worth it" because only this server is under skarnet.org so losing the DNS means losing access to a server that is down anyway.

To have enough redundancy to avoid what happened to me, the external machine would also need to be MX and mail storage. I don't want to install that myself (duplicate work), I don't want to pay for that, and that's a little too much infrastructure to ask friends. I'd rather learn the lesson and not be an idiot next time

[cazabon@mindly.social]

@ska

Was the procedure to wait for a secret code via postal mail?