A Terrifying Necessity

MacOS reinstall. OR ELSE.

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 … and I learned small companies aren’t 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 can’t 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 ol’ 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. It’s entirely possible to utterly wedge them during a reinstall. The recovery process is also super touchy. When they say “wait ten seconds” that means have a stopwatch app running on your phone, try to let up the power button at precisely the right instance, and it’ll 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. I’ve traded in ChatGPT for Anthropic’s 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. It’ll create shell scripts. Terrible, clunky shell scripts that insist on going all CrystalReports on data, and it has no heckin’ clue about the Unix toolchains way of doing things. If you want anything complex, first it’ll 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 you’ve got a hypervisor like VirtualBox running they’ll 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 don’t 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 ain’t no Docker to be had, when Hexnode is lurking …

Conclusion:

I wrote this just after midnight Friday, thinking I’d begin the reinstall in the morning. Now I’m finishing this around lunch time Saturday and it’s 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 I’ll do shorter projects when I’m at my desk. I don’t want to commit to something that’ll keep me pinned down until midnight.

I imagine it’s possible to shim the Docker interface such that it’ll use a remote system. That’s 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. That’s what you guys will do, and it’s what I should do, until I can afford to exercise my Mac upgrade fantasies.