The comms room¶

Before the move, the comms room on the second floor held two machines. One was the Windows Server 2016 running Bestiary, with its SQL Server, its forty-seven local accounts, and a nightly backup that went to a network share on the same physical server, which had been flagged and remained the configuration. The other was the server of uncertain purpose, which had come with the previous building, been moved to this one because nobody could confirm it was safe to switch off, and been discussed at three consecutive IT planning meetings, each of which deferred switching it off on the grounds that it might be important. Fourteen unmanaged phones belonged to this layer too, until the chat page bought the night shift new ones. The scraps for this layer say: the premises are the one place no landlord can suspend, and the one place where the Home is the landlord and had been behaving like a tenant.

The server of uncertain purpose¶

It was imaged first, in full, to a disk that went into the Director’s safe beside the break-glass envelope. Then it was catalogued: what was running, what was listening, what had connected to it in the last ninety days. The answer was a file share nobody had opened in two years, a print queue for a printer that had been scrapped, and a scheduled task that emailed a report to a mailbox that no longer existed. It was switched off on a Tuesday, and left off for a month with the image in the safe, and on the Wednesday of the fifth week it was taken to the recycler. The three planning meetings had been right that it might be important. It had been important in 2019.

Why not Linux¶

The question got asked in the room, by the architect, and the answer is on the sector page: Fabulist was asked whether Bestiary runs on anything but Windows and SQL Server, and said no. A charity does not rewrite its vendor’s resident system, and the residents’ records are the one thing in the building that cannot be down for the time a rewrite would take. So Windows stays, for exactly as long as Bestiary needs it, and the question became how small the Windows could be made.

The answer is one virtual machine. The new host in the comms room runs Proxmox Virtual Environment, an open-source platform from Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, a company founded in 2005 whose products are GNU/Linux, with the KVM hypervisor underneath. On it, Bestiary runs in one Windows Server 2025 virtual machine, licensed from Microsoft, with SQL Server inside it and nothing else, and Windows Server 2025 has extended support to 14 November 2034 by Microsoft’s lifecycle page, which is further away than version 5. Everything else on the host is Linux: the backup client, the Home’s copy of the files and the roster, the imaging of the old machine, and the candidate resident system loaded from Bestiary’s nightly export. The American operating system in the building shrank from the room to a file, and a file can be backed up whole, restored on any other host in an afternoon, and deleted on the day Fabulist ships something that runs elsewhere. That is not the Home leaving Microsoft. It is the Home putting Microsoft in a box with a label on it.

The backup that leaves the building¶

The old backup went to a share on the machine it was backing up, so a failed disk or a locked screen took both. The new one uses Proxmox Backup Server, from the same company, which takes incremental, deduplicated, encrypted backups of the virtual machine and the host, and sends them to targets it describes as not fully trusted, because the encryption is done before they leave. Two targets. One is a disk in the Director’s safe, swapped weekly, the copy that survives the Internet, the landlords and the Home’s own bank. The other is object storage at OVHcloud, OVH Groupe SA of Roubaix, chosen because it shares nothing with Hetzner, which after the sector page’s reading sits under three of the Home’s contracts already. A backup at the same datacentre company as the things it backs up is the network share on the same server, at a larger scale.

The same job carries the Home’s copy of what lives at the landlords: the file store’s contents, the roster’s CSV, the identity provider’s export, the mail archive. That is the “day old at most” on the files page: the job runs nightly to the safe and hourly to Roubaix.

Endpoints¶

Leaving the tenant meant leaving Exchange Online Protection and whatever Defender the licence tier had included, which the Defender page says was never established. The mail filtering went to mailbox.org with the mail. The endpoints, the Windows virtual machine and the staff desktops, got ESET, ESET spol. s r.o. of Bratislava, which put a Slovak company where an American one had been and, for once, cost less than the thing it replaced had appeared to cost for free.

The room, after¶

   comms room, second floor
     │
     Proxmox VE host (Linux) ── ESET on the Windows guest and the desktops
       ├── Bestiary: one Windows Server 2025 VM, SQL Server inside, nothing else
       ├── the Home's copy: files, roster, identity export, mail archive
       ├── the candidate resident system, from Bestiary's nightly export
       └── Proxmox Backup Server ── nightly ──► a disk in the Director's safe, swapped weekly
                                 ── hourly ──► OVHcloud, Roubaix (not Hetzner)

   the server of uncertain purpose: imaged, in the safe; the machine, recycled

The disk in the safe needs no provider to read.

What could go wrong?

The Proxmox host dies, and the Windows file is restored on a spare machine or a rented one within the afternoon, from the safe or from Roubaix, whichever is closer.
Microsoft’s date arrives for 2025, in 2034, and the page is read again by whoever is Head of IT then.
Fabulist ships version 5 on a cloud nobody can place, and the box with the label stays because the box is the Home’s and the cloud is not.
The weekly swap of the safe disk gets skipped for a month, because it is a person’s habit and not a job’s, and the safe copy is the one that survives everything else.

The comms room is gone, what now? The Windows file is restored at OVHcloud or on a rented machine anywhere in Europe from the encrypted copy, Bestiary is back the same day with the residents’ records to the last backup, and the files, the roster and the identity provider were never in the room. The image in the safe walked out with the Director, and no fire in the comms room reaches it.

Granny Weatherwax’s cottage has a cellar that nobody but Granny has ever seen the inside of, and the village assumes it is full of things that would explain a great deal.