Jo Rhett

Overloaded Geek: writer. devOps engineer. operations architect. motorcycle racer. You can track Jo's experience through Jo's business resume

All posts by Jo Rhett

How can I make tech notes available to others?

By on February 3, 2019 - Opinion

One of the reasons I don’t update this site as often as I should is that I’m not sure just how useful it is to others. I want to find a way to make useful information more available. I’d really like to hear your feedback if there are channels I haven’t outlined below:

  • Putting information on your own website is easy and effective, but it feels like to a branch falling deep in the forest. Only those very near will ever hear it.
  • Past history has been to utilize major social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc). Unfortunately, it has been shown that centralization in the hands of commercial entities is not in the publisher or reader’s best interest.
  • Most tech-oriented publications have found that FUD or shock value articles are much more effective from a profit standpoint than actual technical content.

Is there a place where I can provide value in written format to others? I’m not looking for money, just want it to be available/found. I would likely be able to send a minimum of 2 submissions a month.

Dynamic DNS Update with IPv6 in Homebrew

By on September 27, 2018 - Geekery Tags: , ,

I’ve created patches so that troglobit/inadyn compiles on Mac, and offered them a Homebrew Formula too. The formula will be added to Homebrew core when v2.5 stable is released. If you want to try it out now, you can install from HEAD using the repo tap.

$ brew update
$ brew install --HEAD troglobit/inadyn/indadyn

One of the things I really like about inadyn is support for native IPv6 updates. The following config works perfectly for me to update my native IPv6 addresses with Google Domains.

period = 1800
allow-ipv6 = true

provider google {
  username = <em>provided-by-Google</em>
  password = <em>provided-by-Google</em>
  checkip-command = "ifconfig en0 |grep inet6 |grep -v temporary"
}

Using GNU utils on Macs for Makefile compatibility

By on September 12, 2018 - Geekery Tags:

One problem I see often with local builds are Makefiles that use modern GNU features in common commands like sed, awk, and tar. If the product only runs on Linux, writing backwards compatible versions for the older BSD-based commands on Macs may not be an effective use of time.

A simple fix is to add the libexec/gnubin directory to your path as documented here: Install and Use GNU Command Line Tools on macOS. However this changes your active environment, which might break scripts expecting to run on macOS. Further, this isn’t a repeatable configuration that can be safely used by others.

A better way is to explicitly configure the GNU versions to ensure they are used during the build. Read More »