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For those upgrading to macOS Catalina

Catalina (macOS 1.15) comes with tighter security.

Tighter security can cause headaches for developers.

I’m here to help out by providing you with some handy fixes.

To allow running any program from your command line terminal:

  1. Open the “Security & Privacy” system preference.
  2. Click the “Privacy” tab.
  3. Scroll down to “Developer Tools”. If “Developer Tools” is missing, you need to upgrade X-Code first; see below.
  4. Add and enable (check the box) for all the terminal programs you use.

    Some examples:

    • Terminal.app
    • iTerm.app
    • kitty.app
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User credentials in a Jenkins pipeline

The Credentials User Guide implies you can use user credentials. These are credentials that are owned and managed by a user instead of the administrator or the owner of a folder.

The guide explains how to use them with Freestyle jobs (classic Jenkins jobs) but not how to use them with the newer declarative pipeline jobs.

In this post, I’ll show you how to:

  • Set up a job to ask for credentials when triggered.
  • Allow users to provide their user credentials as a parameter.
  • Configure the pipeline job to use the passed in credentials.
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DNS not working with Go binaries and VPNs

If you are having DNS problems (i.e., Host not found) while using a Go binary while connected via a VPN… then I have a solution for you.

The solution is dns-heaven. Just use this command if you trust shell scripts running as root from random people on the Internet:

sudo -v \
  && curl -L https://git.io/fix-my-dns-plz \
   | sudo bash

What’s going on?

On macOS, if a Go program is compiled with CGO_ENABLED=0 then Go uses its own internal network name resolver. This resolver only knows about /etc/resolv.conf and doesn’t know about the libSystem (macOS libc

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Rules for a good announcement

Writing for the digital medium (email, blog posts, slack, discord, etc.) requires breaking the rules you learned in school.

I’m going to explain some rules I use to create announcements for email and slack. These rules work for other digital mediums as well.

To be clear; By announcement I mean notices saying there will be an outage or an upgrade, etc.

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Vim: indirect variable access

In Vim you can use a variable as a variable name.

Instead of using the variable name directly, wrap it in curly braces ({}). This will use the contents of the variable as the variable name.

let l:variable_name = 'b:infosec_username'
let {l:variable_name} = 'George'

echo exists(l:variable_name) " => 1
echo {l:variable_name} " => George
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El Capitan and the evils of OpenSSL

Are you having trouble with SSL on El Capitan (OS X 10.11)?

Me too.

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Spread your knowledge

I found myself trying to figure out how to disable something called NeoComplete (previously known as NeoComplCache) when editing markdown in Vim.

It was colliding with my Markdown stuff pretty badly and had really bad suggestions anyway (I mean, I’m writing text, not code… so no surprise) and I was…

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Chef, Puppet, Heat, Juju, Docker, etc.

Someone emailed me with this question:

I am interested in learning different orchestration mechanisms and would like to understand how they differ.

What are the differences between Chef, Puppet, Heat/HOT, Juju, and Docker?

When would I use a specific one?

There seems to be a lot of similarity between these.

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Setting your environment in test-kitchen

When using test-kitchen it may be necessary to set the environment of your nodes.

You can do with by changing your .kitchen.yml file. In my example, I’ll show it at the root, but they can be set on a per-suite level as well, which is handy to test different environments.

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Unindenting HEREDOCs in Ruby

This is a bit of code I wanted to save.

When using HEREDOCs in Ruby, the <<- operator is handy to keep everything indented in the source. But it doesn’t help with the content of the HEREDOC.

Example:

def example
  puts <<-EOF
This is left.

  This is indented two.
  EOF
end

In rails, you can do this:

def example
  puts <<-EOF.strip_heredoc
    This is left.

      This is indented two.
  EOF
end

There’s a helpful Stack Overflow question on this, in fact.

Here’s a…

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