There’s something oddly humbling about discovering your “secure” setup isn’t quite as bulletproof as you thought. I came across a discussion recently where someone found their Minecraft server had been visited by an unknown player, despite being confident it was locked down behind Tailscale with proper firewall rules. The kicker? They’d left port 443 open at some point “by mistake.”

Look, I get it. We’ve all been there. You set something up, you think you’ve got all your ducks in a row, and then reality comes knocking with a gentle reminder that security is less about a single tool and more about layers of careful configuration. What struck me about this discussion wasn’t just the breach itself, but the fascinating ecosystem of Minecraft server crawlers and griefers that apparently exists out there in the digital wilderness.

I’ve been following a fascinating discussion about Minecraft server performance lately, and it’s got me thinking about something that frustrates me to no end: the way we’ve been conditioned to believe that cloud services are always the answer, even when they’re not.

Someone ran some tests comparing Minecraft chunk generation speeds across different setups - from expensive Hetzner cloud instances to a decade-old CPU that’s barely worth anything. The results? That old hardware was holding its own remarkably well against modern cloud offerings that cost significantly more per month.