Lab Notes · · revive · analyse
October: activated goldens, a blind audit, the web-archive helper live
The base-machine catalog was rebuilt in waves through the month, most of them carrying a newer in-guest agent into the goldens. Each wave ends in an acceptance run: a fresh clone is checked for proxy settings, a reachable agent, screen resolution, a desktop matching its reference, pointer, sound, and whether it is still awake after 25 minutes of idling. On 30 October the Windows 7, 8.1, 10 and 11 goldens were activated online with volume licence keys; fresh clones report “Licensed” and idle without a nag. Windows 7 had failed the “still awake” check because an activation balloon covered the desktop; in the last Windows wave on 31 October all six goldens passed, as did the three Mac goldens the day before.
Also on 30 October, all seven repositories went through a blind audit: each read cold, read-only, nothing executed, findings ranked by correct, safe, holds under load, tested, fast, lean. They were worked off in 27 packages, security and data loss first — one was a failed auto-recovery that could switch the exhibition watchdog off for good — each through a merge request and a green pipeline.
wayback-mcp, the family’s web-archive helper, now runs inside the analysis: capture index, the capture closest to a date, the raw archived bytes, and a quick triage over a cluster of URLs. The first end-to-end analysis after the rollout called it.
Finally, five restored works were cloned again onto the new goldens, each judged the same as before. On two of the emulated Macs the agent starved behind the running work; agent priority and per-system heartbeat deadlines were fixed on 1 November.