Yes, I also used to run an "on premise" server - in my kitchen, not 500km away. I sometimes might need to admin it remotely, but never critical setup work.
And the meme makes it sound like they have to drive there specifically to fix it, like nobody is actually living nearby.

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I mean it's a pretty realistic scenario. I happened to be the unlikely remote hands for the company I work for just a few weeks ago.

Company: an industrial cleaning company with about 1500 AD users and about 8000 employees, historically had 2 corporate offices, currently has three as it's transitioning one corporate office across the country

Server and mistake in question: old admin who's no longer with the company setup the ESXI 6.0 cluster in the server room at the office without documenting the root password to access it. This cluster happens to host the companies critical services including AD so being unable to access the host has been blocking the office migration. Old admin had also not fixed the ESXI backups which have been broken for over 3 years so no backups to restore from. Also the out of band access to the servers was never correctly setup

I happening to be close to this office and having IT experience was poked to go in and with physical access to modify the shadow file and set the root password to be blank. Had I not been available they would have had to fly someone in from the office 2000 miles away or hire a very expensive local contractor to come in after hours to do the same thing

[–] Anivia@feddit.org 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well, I have my server running in my parents basement, because they have fiber, and I don't.

It's not quite a 500km drive, but still a long enough distance for this scenario to be a major inconvenience.

But since I have wireguard running on their router though this specific scenario is not something that could happen to me

[–] buttnugget@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Wireguard is a VPN protocol, so you are able to tunnel into their router to…do what exactly?

[–] Anivia@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It let's me remote into their LAN, thus bypassing the firewall

[–] buttnugget@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Please forgive the ignorance here. What are you trying to do? I thought you were trying to reboot an offline server. I’m probably just confused!

[–] Anivia@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well, the original post (as in the image) is about locking yourself out of a remote server by changing a firewall rule, thus needing to drive to the server to access it locally.

By using wireguard to tunnel into the router, you can remotely enter the LAN, thus bypassing the firewall, as if you were accessing the server locally.

[–] buttnugget@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Ohhhhh gotcha! Thanks for explaining. I think I just invented the offline part in my head lol