Technicals

This blog has been dead for years. It wasn’t deliberate, more the sort of dead that happens when you keep meaning to sort it out and then don’t, for the better part of a decade. At some point I’d archived everything into a flat folder of Markdown files and images and left it there. Today I actually finished the job. The site now runs on Hugo with the PaperMod theme. Hugo takes a folder of Markdown files and turns them into a full static website at build time, and PaperMod is a ready-made visual theme for it, so I didn’t have to design anything from scratch, which was exactly the problem that had killed this blog’s relaunch more than once before. ...

Vagrant is pretty cool, but of late I’ve been having real issues finding a Vagrant base box that works with VMware Fusion OOTB. My blogging workflow (used to) involve(s) using a Vagrant box with Jekyll to generate a static site on my local Mac, and then uploading to an S3 bucket. The Vagrant Jekyll boxes weren’t up to scratch, so I’ve decided to figure out how to create my own. ...

I like the idea of desired state management systems. You define a set of criteria, and your devices will indefinitely match that criteria, returning to the “Desired State” if required. I’ve done this a few times with Jamf Pro, using smart groups, extension attributes and policies to “mimic” the functionality of a desired state management system (which was nice) but I wanted to really get to grips with a system that’s explicitly designed for this purpose. Enter the king of “Desired State” - Puppet. ...

I absolutely cannot stand writing documentation. Well, that’s kind of a lie; I don’t mind the actual writing, but I get too hung up on trying to make it look pretty. If you—the reader—write your own, then maybe you’ll know what I mean. One of the best things about writing docs that’ll be hosted on-line is that the format will be based upon the site that it lives in. Take Github for example; all documentation up there looks the same. This is because they’re all written in Markdown. Markdown is a language syntax that standardises formatting which allows a writer to focus on the content that’s being written. If you’ve never seen a Github readme, check out a few: ...

I had a user with an issue recently where their Mac record in Jamf Pro was not being populated with a correct “Reported IP Address” value when connected to the company’s corporate WiFi. The IP address of the WiFi interface would report the correct value on the device and was singable. For context, this issue: Persisted between inventory updates Would only ever be present when connecting to WiFi (i.e. the issue abated when disabling WiFi and connecting to Ethernet) Would not be resolved by forgetting the SSID and/or deleting and re-adding the network interface Would not be affected by renewing the DHCP lease. Doing some digging, the documentation for the “Reported IP Address” field in Jamf Pro notes that: ...