Why my Mac CI nodes kept forgetting they were allowed to read files, and the 30-kilobyte app that now remembers for them Every so often a machine in my Mac build fleet would come back from a reboot — or from a routine gitlab-runner upgrade — and the first job scheduled on …

How a 1984 Cray X-MP/48 actually stacks up against a decade of iPhone silicon — and why the honest numbers are smaller than the marketing math There's a familiar genre of technology writing: take some storied old machine, hold it up against a modern phone, and marvel that the phone …

I run my Apple builds on a small fleet of Mac runners wired into GitLab CI. Most of the pipeline is unremarkable — build, test, archive, upload — and it had been humming along for months. Then our App Store packaging job started failing intermittently, and the failure made no sense: the …

Twenty-two years ago, I sat down and compared the nutritional data of chicken sandwiches from the big four drive-thru chains: McDonald's, Wendy's, Chick-Fil-A, and Burger King. Back then, Chick-Fil-A's grilled chicken reigned supreme, their fried sandwich was the best of a guilty bunch, and Burger King's Caesar salad was the …

As described previously, we run predominantly SmartOS systems at our data center and that includes using them to run docker in some cases, to quite good effect. A few years ago, multiplatform images started to appear in the docker space, providing the ability to have (mostly) linux arm64 and x86-64 …

This past weekend, I was experimenting with MultiBoard, a 3D printed wall organizer system. Starting there, it's an interesting and useful product. I downloaded the starter kit and printed it. It's well-designed and flexible. As I was playing with the output, I was wondering how to appropraitely (and not necessarily …

Starting with a problem When looking through some recent updates to the Cartographica dependencies, I noticed that some of the updates were not being automatically merged, despite having passed all the tests. All told, not really a big deal, since all I would need to do is manually merge the …

The Goal I recently built out a comprehensive CI/CD pipeline for xcode-sync, a Swift command-line tool that synchronizes Xcode project source groups with filesystem directories. The pipeline handles everything from testing to code signing, notarization, and automatic Homebrew formula updates. The complete flow looks like this: Run Swift tests …

As part of my recent work for automation VyOS, I've been working with Parallels in order to run versions of the router locally for testing. My initial attempts were entirely manual: Look up the latest rolling release on GitHub Download the ISO image from the VyOS website Create a new …

This past week, I upgraded my primary PostgreSQL servers from version 13 to version 16. The process was relatively straightforward, but there were a few glitches that I wanted to document here. My intention is to do this upgrade annually and usually stay a year behind the current release (mostly …

After the recent death of one of my long-running Juniper EX-2200Cs, I needed to find a replacement. I decided to go with a Ruckus ICX 7150-C12P-2X10GR, which is a 12-port PoE switch with 2 10G SPF+ uplinks. It's basically a rebranded Brocade switch. I'd been happy with the Juniper, right …

Given a bit of downtime waiting for my AC repair, I decided to take a look at the login and startup items on my Mac. I've not been having issues, but it seems like good hygiene to know what these are. Unfortunately, although the Open at Login section of the …

With Apple having now announced and made available for developers the next release of macOS (Sequoia), I wanted to put together a quick post (to be updated) on what I've found so far with macOS 15.0 beta and Xcode 16.0 beta. Automated tests were failing when I referenced …

As part of our move to more heavily using VyOS, we've needed to update the vyos collections from ansible, due to some changes in some of the syntax for 1.4+ of VyOS. There are some pitfalls to setting up and editing ansible collections, especially ones that are for network …

Google Search is interesting. Over the past 2 months, over 2000 of my posts on this blog have been removed from the index. Not shockingly, it’s hard to tell why. Some of the stuff that got removed were original articles with analysis or opinion, and some of the ones …

I've been describing our Hashicorp Vault journey here at ClueTrust in a number of posts. Chief among the reasons to use Vault is its ability to generate and rotate credentials with specific systems and services. I've written before about PostgreSQL credential management using Vault, which has been quite successful. This …

I regularly use poetry in order to isolate development environments as I'm putting applications together. I've been happy with it, and there are a number of methods that I've developed for using poetry in various environments. For production, there are a number of different mechanisms used by people in the …

I've been very happy using Renovate (the free version) for use on my personal projects. I've previously discussed running it on one of my k8s clusters. Today, I was trying to deal with a very specific problem: I needed to track a dependency via git tags, instead of tracking the …

After upgrading to Sonoma, I started occasionally (and then repeatedly) noticing warning messages and errors related to cloud files in my laptop and desktop machines in the area that is for iCloud. The specific files aren't important, although they seem to be related to applications (mostly on the phone) that …

The first time I did this I didn't document it very well, causing the next time to be more time consuming, so here's the rundown. It's not a secret that we use some older Dell hardware as servers in our datacenter. We've been pretty happy with it since switching away …