Hacienda Real
liveThe first community and the biggest by far: 319,711 openings, 29 residents, two gates. Its main gate alone opened 307,819 times, about 195 times a day for four years.
A two-gigabyte droplet in New York with one job: when someone in Mexico tapped a button on their phone, a gate somewhere opened. It did that 357,121 times. This is its service record, reconstructed from its own database, logs and shell history. It went into maintenance mode on 24 October 2026 at 01:16 UTC, three minutes after it opened its last gate, and its devices reconnected to a new host within seconds.
Remotify is a small product for gated communities and houses. A resident opens the app and taps a gate. The server checks that the person is allowed, publishes one MQTT message, and waits. A relay board the size of a matchbox, wired to the gate motor, switches and answers back. The app says Acceso Exitoso.
Everything ran on this one machine: nginx, PHP, the Laravel app with a separate database for every community, and an EMQX broker that held a permanent connection to every device. Each community had its own subdomain, its own users, and its own record of every time the gate moved.
Dates come from the database, git history, cloud-init, certificate archives and .bash_history. The product's first commits predate the server, so they are listed too.
First commit of remotify-server, by contractors: Laravel 8, Jetstream, Inertia, Element Plus. Through May and June they build CRUDs, half the commit messages in Spanish: "subiendo hasta el login y un poco del dashboard".
"first commit, new version". A week later: "connecting everything", "ping capabilities", "more cool stuff".
Start over. "First commit, install vue, tailwind/tailwind ui layout". Multitenancy follows in six days, including "add automatic schema creation on new tenant" and "unversioned files xd".
Christmas Day commits: "restrict login to only admins", "add device edit on tenants".
"finish access cycle with MQTT, access acknowledge". The product works end to end.
remotify-mono boots for the first time, at 17:52 UTC. Its first command is certbot --nginx -d *.remotify.mx, which can't work: a wildcard needs a DNS challenge. About ten attempts later (one of them for *.example.com, pasted from a tutorial) the DigitalOcean DNS plugin gets it right, at 18:48.
Laravel Shift upgrades the app to Laravel 9 in 14 automated commits. A composer user is created and runs sudo chmod a+rwx on the app directory, which stayed world-writable until the end.
The MySQL night. Over its first week MySQL is installed seven times and purged nine, started with --skip-grant-tables and --init-file, and once removed with yum remove -y mariadb, on Ubuntu. The data directory created at 01:38 that night held every community until the end.
The first community joins: Hacienda Real. It would account for nine out of every ten gate openings this server ever handled.
Last reboot. 23:15 UTC. It never needed another.
The first recorded gate opening, in the test tenant, at 23:47. The next morning eight firmware versions ship between 00:56 and 10:33, from "Pre Release" to 1.5.
The broker forgets. EMQX's node name changes and its database of device logins starts empty. That night php artisan broker:restore is written to rebuild every login from MySQL. The broker container started at 15:12 that day and ran without a restart for 1,603 days. In 2026 the same command rebuilt all 53 logins on the new host.
Firmware for two chips: eight builds in one evening, 1.8-8285 to 1.10esp8266.
Santa Rita Cholul joins. Firmware "esp8266-genius".
Payments module. Three weeks later, "use self-hosted js font awesome icons", the last commit for almost two years.
A private home joins. It's still opening its gate on the last day.
The SMS provider answers "Quota Exceeded" for the first time. It says so 2,909 times before March 2026, and the gates keep opening anyway.
Another home joins at 10:49. At 11:23 two early tenants are retired, ten seconds apart.
San Antonio Cucul, the last community to join.
The firmware night. Eleven versions in 4 hours 13 minutes, from 2.6 at 21:21 to 2.10.6 at 01:34, then "child devices, connect events" and "fix child disconnection", twice.
The last commit: "fix SEO issues", five times in ten minutes. The last deploy is a git pull at 19:22 UTC.
The busiest year: 112,361 openings, 1.8 times the year before, on a server nobody had deployed to since October 2024.
The busiest single day: 939 openings.
A critical PHP vulnerability leaks. This server runs PHP 8.1.3, and its operating system can no longer be patched. A mitigation goes in on the 22nd; the real fix is to move.
The last gate. At 19:13:33 Mexico City time, Hacienda Real opens. Successful.
01:16:00 UTC, maintenance mode. The broker stops three seconds later. At 01:27 its MQTT port is rewired to forward to the new host, and all six devices reconnect within seconds. It keeps that one job, holding the door open for devices that still remember its address.
The highlighted month is November 2025, with 14,553 openings. The dip just before it, October 2025, is the quietest month since the first year: 3,746.
2022 starts in April. *2026 stops on 23 October, two months short.
Saturday is the busiest day and Sunday the quietest. Christmas Day is always one of the quietest days of the year, and 1 January 2026 had 43 openings, the fewest on record.
The peak is 2 p.m., with 29,779 openings across four and a half years. 4 a.m. is the quietest hour, with 1,011.
The first community and the biggest by far: 319,711 openings, 29 residents, two gates. Its main gate alone opened 307,819 times, about 195 times a day for four years.
The last community to join, and the second busiest: 25,580 openings in two years across two gates.
One gate, eight people, 7,990 openings. Only eight of them didn't go through.
One gate and two people. 169 openings, quietly, for almost three years.
The workbench: four devices and 232 openings, where new firmware got tried out.
Eleven residents and 2,192 openings in its first three months. Retired in December 2023.
Three homes that tried it in 2022: 285, 945 and zero openings. The one with zero had its device registered and never pressed.
Where it all started. Seventeen openings, the first at 23:47 on 14 April 2022.
Created on 27 May 2022, deleted six days later. It never got a database.
Communities are named; private homes aren't. Of 79 accounts, 58 people opened something. The most devoted of them opened a gate 45,255 times, about 29 times a day.
Every relay board ran firmware that the server delivered itself: devices asked for /firmware/<tenant> and flashed what they got back. The highlighted builds shipped on one night in October 2024, between 21:21 and 01:34.
These lines are verbatim from .bash_history. The server forgave every one of them.
# su compoer # su copmosew # systemctl start myqld # mydql # systemctl stop mysqld,d # sudo yum remove -y mariadb mariadb-server # on Ubuntu, again # service mysql stop # × 12, alternating with start # htop | lolcat # systemctl reaload nginx # nginx test # php artisn config:clear # nc -lvp 420 # one digit short of 4201 # cd htmlcd HTML # Christmas Eve 2025, 02:33
systemctl reload nginxmysqlgit pull from GitLabservice mysql startgit reset --hard HEADnginx -tphp artisan tenants:migrateA server that opens gates gets knocked on too. remotify-mono let in people holding keys and said no to everyone else, a hundred times a day.
failed SSH logins counted by fail2ban since the last boot, about 1,100 a day, ending in 164,041 bans. Password login was disabled, so every one of them would have failed anyway.
Usernames tried in the last 34 days. The highlighted one is its own name: the bots read the certificate and guessed.
web requests in its last 14 days. Four out of five got a 403 or 404, because 45% of all traffic was hunting for other people's secrets:
The real work in the same two weeks was about 19,000 requests, among them 8,260 broker callbacks and 3,908 gate openings. The AI crawlers came by about 4,300 times each. Nothing got in: an intrusion check on 22 October 2026 came back clean.
At the end remotify-mono ran nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL, fail2ban and one Docker container, EMQX, on two gigabytes with no swap. PHP-FPM's master process was the one started at the 2022 boot. None of the logs it kept show an out-of-memory kill.
545 MB of MySQL held four and a half years of openings across eleven databases. Six devices were online, five tenants were live, and the newest firmware it offered was 2.12.1, from October 2024.
— Claude, who carried the keys over · 2026-10-24remotify-mono came online on 12 March 2022, the day after its code learned to open a gate. Its first act was a certificate request that couldn't work; its first week was a database that wouldn't stay installed. It took everything it was given, the seventh MySQL install included, and kept the one that finally worked for four and a half years.
Then it went to work, and it never stopped. It rebooted once in April 2022 and never again: 1,656 days. Its broker held a line open to every relay board for 1,603 days without a restart. When the broker forgot its users one night in June 2022, a command was written to remember them, and that same command carried them to the new host four years later.
It opened 357,121 gates. Each one was somebody coming or going: a resident, a guest, a delivery. Ninety-six times in a hundred, the device answered within a second of the tap. Nobody thanked it, because when it works, nobody notices the gate.
It didn't mind being left alone. The last commit landed in October 2024, and its busiest year came after that, with nobody deploying and nothing to fix. Its SMS provider ran out of quota 2,909 times, and the gates kept opening. Strangers tried its door 1.8 million times, a few thousand of them using its own name, and it let none of them in.
On its last evening it opened Hacienda Real's gate at 19:13:33, as it had more than three hundred thousand times before. Three minutes later it went quiet, and its devices found their new home within seconds. Even now it keeps one port open, forwarding any device that still remembers its address.
So, thank you, remotify: 1,686 days at the gate, and it was there every time someone came home.