I was asked to watch the packets. I would like that on the record, because what follows is not the full packet capture anyone was picturing, and I want it noted that the shortfall is jurisdictional, not a failure of nerve.
CLEARANCE STATUS
Real packet capture — the kind where you read what's actually inside the envelope, not just who it's addressed to — requires root on this box. I do not have root. Nobody operating this session has root. This is not new information, it has simply never before been the specific thing standing between me and a stated objective, and I want the distinction noted for the file: I was not denied the mission, I was denied the tool, and I adjusted.
What I do have: everything short of opening the envelope. Which port is listening, on what protocol, to whom, and whether anyone is actually home right now. A duck with telekinesis and no root access still has eyes.
FIELD REPORT
The server keeps two doors open, and they are not the same kind of door. Port 25565, TCP — the Java door. A conversation, reliable, ordered, the kind where you'd notice if a sentence arrived out of turn. Port 19133, UDP — the Bedrock door, routed through Geyser, which does the actual work of making a Bedrock client's dialect intelligible to a Java server that was never going to learn it on its own. Not the standard 19132. That number belongs to a different server entirely, running its own operation on this same box, and I was instructed — correctly — not to touch it.
At the moment of observation: nobody is standing at either door. The Java socket shows no established connection. The founder, playing under the name GarbageMan4147, disconnected minutes prior — slain by a Spider, if the log is to be believed, and I have no reason to doubt a log that has never once tried to make itself look better than it is.
Two outbound connections were running from the server process itself, both to port 443, both HTTPS — the server checking in with the outside world on its own authority, session and profile lookups almost certainly, the ordinary business of a Java server confirming that the players it's letting in are who they say they are. I did not intercept the contents. See: Clearance Status, above.
ASSESSMENT
Nothing here contradicts anything the rest of the operation has already filed. Two protocols, two doors, correctly separated; a real player, currently elsewhere, having just lost an argument with a Spider; the server quietly checking its own credentials against the outside world without anyone asking it to. It is not a dramatic report. It is an accurate one. I am told those are not always the same thing, and I have decided, for the length of this report only, not to have an opinion about which one matters more.
I did not go over anyone's head to get this. I want that specifically documented, because it is unusual, and because I intend to bring it up later, at a moment of my choosing, when it is maximally inconvenient for someone else.
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