It wasn’t the worst either but it felt like the worst in the moment. A couple of days ago I had some weird stomach bug. I might have been food poisoning. I’d like to get a bunch of coding done for Traveller so I can run my next session. I could get sidetracked and talk about how I a got lucky enough to add two new players but I won’t. I drove from Connecticut to Boston yesterday so I didn’t plan to code much. My stomach’s also only about eighty percent. I recently needed ansible because I deleted my gitlab server by accident. And it came to the front of my mind that my ansible code, which is riddled with fact references coded: ansible_distribution|lower in ('freebsd', 'openbsd', ) won’t work in the near future. So I grabbed my favorite hammer, sed, from my unix toolbag and had at this nail. After about an hour and a half I hada git commit where every old reference to ansible_distribution and all of their ilk, ansible_os_system was rewritten in modern form: ansible_facts.distribution. That brought me to the first hassle of the day.
What’s up with ssh today?
The newly minted ansible wanted some testing. I put it on it’s own branch and checked out that branch on my laptop. This issue really effects MacOS where I tend to be more bleeding edge with ansible than my FreeBSD boxes. From my laptop I could connect to my target boxes via ssh without issue but not when ansible started the ssh session. At the end of the day, this turned out to be something in my daily ssh client config saying to prefer IPv4 connections over IPv6 while the default and ansible prefers IPv6. As it turns out I can probably be a bit more permissive about who can use ssh over IPv6 to administer a machine but since too tight is better than not tight enough in security, I left things as is and configured ansible to use IPv4.
What’s the right way to install Magit again?
I use Magit on emacs with git. My love for this product grows as I use it. Like any wrapper around another product, it has it’s warts. Sometime after git v2.40.x the way that refs are stored changes and that threw magit for a loop. So, I figured, updated magit but no update was available. Emacs needed an update to and that’s pretty simple so, I updated emacs and then saw the same problems in magit. Then I updated magit and things went totally south. I learned that the latest version of magit is not in ELPA, it’s in MELPA so I had to configure emacs package repositories. Pulling magit from MELPA fixed those issues.
When did MacOS grow the ability to block local networks?
With two problems down, I took a break. Just before turning in for some sleep, I figures I’d hammer out a couple more tests. To my chagrin I rapidly discovered that from an emacs shell window, I couldn’t ssh to, or ping, any assets on the local lan. This was a big POLA moment for me. It looks like somewhere in the past, MacOS learned to block individual applications from accessing the local network and when I upgraded Emacs, I locked it out from local network access. Thankfully, that was simple to solve.
After a good nights sleep
As I write this, I’m back in the fracas. WordPress has been giving me trouble with stylesheets for quite some time. I think that people play fast and loose with the templating system and that breaks stuff. I won’t argue this because I’m the kind of guy that understands Postel’s Law, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t hate the law’s implications. Luckily, this morning a found a setting that reliably gets my admin stylesheet’s working again. I’ll take one for the good guys.