After the Death of Vleebqitl, S E B needed new dedicated transmitter hardware. I could only run a (temporary) instance on my laptop for so long.
Near-Term Solution
I bought a tiny little PC which came pre-installed with Window 10 Home Edition.
“Hooray,” I thought. More specifically,
Hooray! I’ll install VirtualBox and use RDP for remote maintenance. Problem solved!
However, my delight was short-lived.
Mid-Term Struggles
I cannot emphasize enough how piss-poor a piece of software Window 10 Home Edition makes for an unattended server. It regularly self-installed OS updates, which often required a full reboot.
Did I see any warning? No. Again, emphasis on the “unattended” part.
These posts on 2017-Jun-14 and 2017-Dec-10 have all the trappings of being update-related. The general theme is
Oh noes! The station went down!
Sorry :( I gotta go home to reboot it.
Because, you see, the Home version didn’t officially support RDP. Sure, the code was all there in the OS, but it was disabled. After a major OS upgrade, the server would boot back up in a locked-down state.
Thank Goddess for RDPWrap, an open-source project which would hack RDP support back into being. I’d have to hook up a KVM and add the latest bytecode offsets to an INI file, once the folks-in-the-know had computed them for us.
Long-Term Fail
The situation became untenable.
These three posts – from 2018-Mar-14, 2018-May-30, and 2019-Mar-01 – actually call out Windows 10 by name. When I start repeatedly blaming something by name, that’s a clear indidation; it’s bad.
Struggles continue on 2019-May-29. Even my attempts to pro-actively perform manual updates – such as 2019-Dec-11 – were frustrating and unpredictable.
I remember this post from 2020-Jul-22 where I grumbled
Microsoft has executed forced upgrades on the Transmitter 3 times in the past five days.
I was fed the hell up. And it still took me another five months to finally give Window 10 Home Edition a kick to the curb.