Ubuntu Server Scare

Last night, I got a scare trying to login into my Ubuntu Server…very strange! Tried to ssh in, and the terminal just looked at me before timing out so I was very puzzled. So I hooked up Ubuntu server to a monitor & keyboard. I attempted to login with the giant cryptic password from my password manager, but before I could type it in it timed out!


So I booted to single user mode and changed the password to something short. But while I was at root I did a directory “ls -la /home” because I wanted to be double check my user id. That’s where I REALLY got confused…no subdirectories were listed in /home!?!? WTH?

I was convinced, I somehow got hacked and almost decided to give-up on NextCloud. But just for the heck of it I decided to reboot locally and try and login to my userid with the short password. To my surprise I was successful and my userid files were all there? From there I did a “sudo ls /home” and it showed my userid directory?????

Tried again to remote login to my server and it timed out AGAIN! Finally realized I wasn’t using the correct IP address. One of the octets was 168 and I typed 198. As Maxwell Smart would say missed it by that much : ) So all the above worry and detective work was for nothing. However I still don’t understand why my userid on the Ubuntu server doesn’t show up in /home (nothing does!). I did do a little googling but saw no answers.So logged in and finally successfully updated Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 LTS by “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade”.