Teething Troubles

Teething Troubles

We have been in Spain a fortnight now and things are going well, if a little too slowly to completely alleviate our anxieties over Neem’s visa. However, we are experiencing a few teething troubles.

I think that we have found out that our immediate goals need to be to get NIE (an ID card, I think) and Residencia (the right to live here) for the both of us.

We are waiting for a solicitor to get back to us, which is one of our teething troubles. Everything moves so slowly here, but our time is limited by Neem’s 90-day visa. Without those documents you cannot hire a room or an apartment, buy a car, or even a SIMM card, which means that Neem has to use Skype and Facebook to talk to her nearest and dearest back in Thailand, but not all of them have those facilities.

Another of our teething troubles took me all day today to identify, but it turned out to be as comical as it was annoying.

I use the Internet a lot every day, but yesterday, it suddenly became impossible to upload an article to this site. I kept trying and eventually went to bed. This morning, my email stopped working as well. It was too much of a coincidence, especially since the signal was strong and at 65Mbits/sec.

I submitted a support ticket and waited and nothing came, it could not because I had no email. Hours later, I checked my support ticket and was surprised to see that it had been archived as ‘Resolved’. Apparently, their firewall had detected a ‘mass attack by brute force from more than one computer at IP XXXXXXXX’.

I copied the IP Address to investigate and thanked them. WhoIs reported the IP location to be Marbella – just down the road from us.

A thought occurred, so I asked Google my IP. Yes, they were identical.

I had been accused of attacking my own website (although I only have one computer), and consequently blocked by the host’s firewall!

It took some time to persuade the support staff that I had moved to Spain from Thailand, but all is back to normal now. Still, why did it take them a fortnight to notice the Spanish Connection?

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All the best,

Owen

Podcast: Teething Troubles