WHAT I AM DOING NOW
Updated July 15, 2026

I am working on Mission Control, my increasingly elaborate system for watching all the strange little services running on my VPS.

The new Mission Control Agent is running as a systemd service on joyful-vps. It collects Docker statistics and currently sees about thirteen containers.

It also performs real protocol-level checks against:

* HappyEcho on TCP port 7
* HappyQOTD on TCP port 17
* HappyGopher on TCP port 70
* HappyFinger on TCP port 79

The checks do more than confirm that a port is open. They actually speak enough of each protocol to verify that the service is responding correctly.

The Agent can now combine the container metrics and probe results into a node snapshot and publish it to Mission Control through JoyfulReaperLib.

I also recently built HappyQOTD into both a small quote API and a real TCP Quote of the Day server. It has SQLite storage, daily quote selection, rate limiting, health checks, Docker support, and Mission Control telemetry.

Next:

* Deploy the latest Mission Control Agent
* Confirm node snapshots reach the Gateway, RabbitMQ, and Archive
* Add tests for the Agent and protocol probes
* Improve failure reporting when one collector fails
* Eventually make all of this visible in a useful Mission Control interface

Apparently I am building my own tiny Internet operations center for services based on protocols from the 1980s.
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