What the SSH
Last week, the SSH connection to my linux server envs stopped working out of the blue. Can't ping envs. Can't connect to the website. Oddly enough, the matrix website and email were working just fine. Connecting to the server is very important for my plant's health. The envs server might be in for some upgrade and I just landed at a wrong time, or so I thought. When I couldn't connect even the next day, I shot off an email to ~creme who confirmed that envs is indeed up and running and he could see my log from two days ago. My needle of suspicion now pointed at my ISP. Those damn meddling a-holes. Thankfully, It was a passing thought and it would have incredibly rude to call them that. Those poor guys tried hard to resolve my issue and supported me best from their graveyard shift. My ISP wasn't blocking the server. If only I had checked my mobile internet, I could have verified it for myself but you know, rage and coffee is a mighty good way to throw reason out the window. Anyway, my server was up plus my ISP wasn't the culprit so it had be my stupid network, right? I parked my diagnosis right there as I had to pack my bags to set course for a trip over the long weekend with barely an hour left. A quick shower included.
Four days passed. During these 4 days, I watered my plant via the phone.
Fifth day. I am back home and after unpacking and mowing and watering the lawn, I sat down to isolate my network. I have the ISP router connected to my personal router, via IP passthrough, which speaks to all the devices via a pi-hole. The pi-hole handles the DHCP and also handle DoH with dnscrypt. First step was to turn off DoH. No connection. Changed DNS servers. No connection. Switched off pi-hole. No connection. Took off router and used ISP router directly. No connection. Tried connecting to envs via phone from within the network with all of the above turned on. Connected. What?! The real culprit was the stupid device I was using. A verbose SSH session (ssh -v me@x.x.x.x) said the connection was getting timed out. And this was a problem only for this laptop? The fuck? Oh the words I uttered in Malayalam at my laptop would make my mother disown me.
But you won't believe what happened next.
As I was trying to glean more information from a new ssh verbose connection, the connection was established and I was in! Nothing on the network had changed. Nothing on the laptop either. It just connected after some rage infused expletives encouraging words. What the SSH?