I was sat down watching crap telly last night, fiddling on the laptop connected to the server over SSH. I was trying to get fail2ban to work with wordpress, so it would ban an IP based on a bad login. So when fiddling I was checking the log files and it was showing that iptables were not working properly. After much Googling I ended up trying to reinstall the kernel. This did indeed reinstall, unfortunately it didn’t install the network drivers which apparently were part of some extension package. So I was now left with a system that booted but had no network connectivity. So travelled upstairs and got on the console. Ended up restoring from a backup. Didn’t work. Tried various restores. Didn’t work. Tried deleting the /boot directory and restoring that, except it wasn’t on the backup. So now had a system that wouldn’t even boot and just sat there at a grub prompt. Bugger. So reinstalled the OS as a clean install. Thankfully it only took a few minutes. System then booted with full networking. Except now of course it was a blank system. So tried restoring the backup again and then rebooted. All came back up and instantly started working again. Relief. So expanded the volume and checked a few things. This wasn’t bad activity considering I’d downed two bottles of wine during the panic.

So today I just monitored the logs. Thankfully everything was fine, as a bonus fail2ban was now working fine. So I added the wordpress jails and all seems to work.

I’m not going to touch it again now until I come back.