Happy Holidays!
As of today the audience is small (read: non-existent), so let’s be clear: since the Spooky Update I forgot this blog existed. No progress on vibe coding. All the “security” posts are about windows updates. I haven’t committed anything to repo in a month. I did rebuild my domain as I mentioned a couple months ago and I removed the desktop from the Proxmox cluster. Both of these would have made great articles, but it’s too bad I forgot about the blog.
I stood up a Minecraft server. No big deal…then I setup and configured a dozen plugins, made it publicly available, and stood up a map website behind nginx and Cloudflare. Another great example of a blog post I should have written, but I had such a great time I forgot to document it. The kids had a blast helping me, too.
Thanksgiving happened. The Sunday before we did Server OS updates, but I didn’t participate. Instead, I updated my status script with an exception list, per my teams request. The whole point of this script was to help the team get through updates faster. The old script was good, but it took too long, so I re-wrote it using hashtables instead of arrays. I also replaced ping with my own connectivity checker function that initiates a tcp connection on 3389 and times out after 100 ms. This means we have a minimum run time of 100ms per server, as opposed to 4 and 12 seconds for up and down servers, respectively. Next I reorganized remote commands so all tests could be done with one connection of Powershell’s Invoke-Command, saving time by not connecting/disconnecting between commands, plus Invoke-command runs against a server list in parallel by default. This means I could test servers in large batches instead of using multiple foreach and running through them sequentially.
All in all the new script took 4 minutes to run against 500 servers, where the old script took 15 minutes per 100 servers! That’s a 3 million percent increase!.* Needless to say, the team finished quite a bit earlier than usual this weekend.
Lastly, I make no promises this month. I’m burnt out on VM lab stuff, I forgot to document November’s nerdy stuff, and Christmas/vacation is on it’s way. See you all (my non-existent audience) in January!
* That number is made up because I didn’t want to math.