problem solved

I usually wake up ridiculously early, around 4 AM, like some kind of overcaffeinated medieval monk.

But today? Today I woke up at almost 3 PM.

Apparently my body looked at the schedule and said, “Nope. We’re filing for bankruptcy.”

I think I was way more exhausted than I realized. I basically slept through the entire day, then spent the remaining hours moving through life with the processing speed of a potato running Windows Vista.

To be fair, I had just survived a glorious battle against a bunch of silly little hackers.

I logged into the server, noticed it was crawling like a zombie with Wi-Fi issues, and quickly realized it was under a DDoS attack. There were also probably brute-force attempts against SSH, because apparently some botnet woke up and chose violence.

So, naturally, I did what any responsible server goblin would do: I summoned fail2ban and ufw like ancient firewall spirits.

It still took me a few hours to get things under control.

The big clue was the CPU load, which was flirting with 40 when it normally barely goes above 2. Someone — or rather, an army of very dumb bots — was desperately trying to break into my system.

They were scanning a WordPress blog I had made for my cousin, then using that as a starting point to poke around the entire server like drunk raccoons in a data center.

Looks like they’ve calmed down now.

For the moment, the server lives. I, however, require coffee and possibly a firmware update.