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 β¦ and I learned small companies arenβt 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 canβt 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 olβ 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. Itβs entirely possible to utterly wedge them during a reinstall. The recovery process is also super touchy. When they say βwait ten secondsβ that means have a stopwatch app running on your phone, try to let up the power button at precisely the right instance, and itβll 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. Iβve traded in ChatGPT for Anthropicβs 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. Itβll create shell scripts. Terrible, clunky shell scripts that insist on going all CrystalReports on data, and it has no heckinβ clue about the Unix toolchains way of doing things. If you want anything complex, first itβll 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 youβve got a hypervisor like VirtualBox running theyβll 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 donβt 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 ainβt no Docker to be had, when Hexnode is lurking β¦
Conclusion:
I wrote this just after midnight Friday, thinking Iβd begin the reinstall in the morning. Now Iβm finishing this around lunch time Saturday and itβs 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 Iβll do shorter projects when Iβm at my desk. I donβt want to commit to something thatβll keep me pinned down until midnight.
I imagine itβs possible to shim the Docker interface such that itβll use a remote system. Thatβs 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. Thatβs what you guys will do, and itβs what I should do, until I can afford to exercise my Mac upgrade fantasies.
Not a fan of Docker eitherβ¦ the old meme βthereβs a Docker in your Dockerβ always cracks me up ;)