Hexnode Praxis and Dedicated Hexnode right at the start of this year were the beginning of ANOTHER abortive attempt at Hexnode. There are limits to what grassroots groups will do ā¦ and I learned small companies arenāt much different.
I managed to free my mobile devices, Linux reinstalls are simple, and Windows virtual machines can simply be discarded. Sadly, there is no easy method of curing this problem with MacOS. An aggressive find command application canāt get everything and Hexnode then reinstalls itself.
I waded through fixing this on Pinky, my MacAir, and it took efforts spread over thirty six hours. That included waiting for an Anker Thunderbolt 4 cable, after many hours of trying to get a plain olā USB-C cable to work in restore mode.
If I had not had two M1 Macs and a friend who works in an Apple service center I would have zero Macs. Itās entirely possible to utterly wedge them during a reinstall. The recovery process is also super touchy. When they say āwait ten secondsā that means have a stopwatch app running on your phone, try to let up the power button at precisely the right instance, and itāll still take a couple tries to hit it just right.
Motivation:
After fixing Pinky I decided to just leave Brain alone, since I use it all day every day and it has a much more complex configuration than its smaller sibling. This all changed this week thanks to my AI epiphany. Iāve traded in ChatGPT for Anthropicās Claude and I started working with Model Context Protocol.
There are some basic things that Claude desktop can do, if you coax it a bit. Itāll create shell scripts. Terrible, clunky shell scripts that insist on going all CrystalReports on data, and it has no heckinā clue about the Unix toolchains way of doing things. If you want anything complex, first itāll try to write some Python, which is tolerable for me, but then it wants Docker.
Have I ever mentioned how intensely I dislike Docker? Most Unix daemons just want to open a couple TCP or UDP ports. Docker seizes control of your entire firewall setup on Linux. If youāve got a hypervisor like VirtualBox running theyāll fight over network interface stuff. Normally I just corral it in a virtual machine so the host network stuff is more easily controlled, so I donāt know what it does with MacOS or Windows. I asked Claude and it tells me it only works with a local Docker instance for the sake of performance and security.
And there aināt no Docker to be had, when Hexnode is lurking ā¦
Conclusion:
I wrote this just after midnight Friday, thinking Iād begin the reinstall in the morning. Now Iām finishing this around lunch time Saturday and itās a nope. I am not as beat up as I was last weekend with Shingrex, but the combination of pneumonia and hep B vax has me in no place to undertake some arduous process. I will be up and down today, so Iāll do shorter projects when Iām at my desk. I donāt want to commit to something thatāll keep me pinned down until midnight.
I imagine itās possible to shim the Docker interface such that itāll use a remote system. Thatās actually quite desirable here, keep the desktop free, use one of the Proxmox machines as a compute server. The Mac has more compute power, but those machines are the ones with a terabyte of space for VMs and 5TB single drive data volumes.
But before I do that, a simple setup so I can focus on Claude and Model Context Protocol is required. Thatās what you guys will do, and itās what I should do, until I can afford to exercise my Mac upgrade fantasies.
