Most of the early hours went on finishing the sim rig drive swap. The rest went on audits and research for other jobs.

Sim rig boots from the 1 TB drive

After I swapped the drive in at about 00:30, Windows started from the MSI M480 as C: and I could reach it over SSH. Windows is activated and the recovery tools are enabled on the new drive. BitLocker had switched itself back on at first boot and backed the new recovery key up to my Microsoft account, so I only needed to update my paper copy from the account page.

The system file scan reported 556 missing component files. The same 556 are missing from the backup of the old 2 TB drive, so the problem existed before the move. I ran DISM /RestoreHealth at 01:17 and it finished by 01:34. It fixed 2,289 problems in total, more than the first scan listed because the repair is more thorough, and Windows now reports no corruption. No restart was needed.

By 03:23 I had checked that OneDrive, Steam and iRacing all work. The old 2 TB drive still has BitLocker suspended, so its unlock key is readable on the disk. After a few days of normal use I'll either wipe it or put it back in once to turn BitLocker on. I kept the image on the T7 in case I needed to restore it again.

Testing a scraper I'd been handed

A function venue client needs a tool that finds government contacts to approach about booking functions. I was handed someone else's scraper along with its run commands, plus the venue's brochure and its spreadsheet template. I ran it as given and checked its output against the sources. It didn't hold up: the distances and addresses it wrote were wrong, and too much of each row couldn't be traced back to anything real.

The venue's template turned out to be a working sales tracker with six tabs and a 48-column Leads sheet. The scraper wrote a separate one-tab file with 39 columns, and its values don't match the template's dropdowns, so the Summary tab would show zero for everything. I decided to build my own tool instead of patching it. Late in the evening I started researching how venue booking marketplaces work, to see where real leads could come from.

Auditing the hotel IPTV pilot plan

I went back over the work from the 16th, checking every claim in the plan against the raw switch output and emails, then reading it again as a critic. The facts held up, but a few things changed what I'll ask the hotel's IT provider for:

• Add a tripwire at link-up on GE1/0/24 to catch a leak into VLAN 50, since the original check couldn't tell the difference.
• Drop the "keep port 22 disabled until we call" step, because it only adds two more changes for them to make.
• Change the second-querier rule so .251 seen on port 22 passes and a second querier on port 44 is only noted.

The plan also had no fallback if the IT provider doesn't reply, so I added one. I have an email to the IT provider drafted and I'm reviewing it before anything is sent.

A drive from pve04 for the camera recorder

I want to take one of pve04's two NVMe drives and use it as a UniFi Protect cache, with a script syncing it to the NAS. It can be done without a reinstall. ZFS can move the 15 GB in use onto one drive, and I'd pull the SK hynix, which has 5% wear against the WD's 38%. It would be a weak stopgap, though. A 256 GB drive holds about 1.1 days of high quality footage against about 4 days on the old 1 TB, and Ubiquiti requires a DRAM cache that I believe neither drive has. I haven't confirmed that. Nothing was changed.

Still open

• Wipe the old 2 TB sim rig drive, or re-enable BitLocker on it, after a few days.
• Review and send the email to the hotel's IT provider; the pilot only runs if they confirm.
• Build the leads tool for the venue.
• Decide whether the pve04 drive stopgap is worth doing.