Writings on Institute of Ineptitude

Hello, World

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Here is where I write going forward. My little place of what is supposed to be a decentralized web.

Little experiments in computer science, debugging, code, infrastructure. Whatever I feel like.

If it ever evolves into something good. I’ll write my name on it. For now, it’s just ineptitude.

Quick Pods

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 23:07:02 -0700

Sometimes you just need a quick pod of a given Linux flavour to test a quick scenario:

kubectl run debian-container -n default --rm -it --image=debian:stable -- bash

kubectl run circle-container -n default --rm -it --image=cimg/base:2026.01 -- bash

kubectl run go-container -n default --rm -it --image=cimg/go:1.25.5 -- bash

kubectl run ubuntu-container -n default --rm -it --image=ubuntu:26.04 -- bash

Also, the CLI to get just load balancers is annoying:

macOS: Flush the DNS cache

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 18:56:22 -0700

This is common knowledge… but I don’t need to do it enough to have it memorized… and I’m tired of looking it up!

So I’m writing it down here:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

There! Now it’s written down on the web in one more place… 🙄

Condition Evaluation Utility

Sat, 06 Dec 2025 21:41:18 -0700

After you run a command in UNIX shell (bourne, bash, etc), $? has the exit code (return value) of the prior run command:

 $? Expands to the exit status of the most recent pipeline.

Shell scripting is a bit weird in that the return value of a program is evaluated as true if it’s 0 and false if it’s non-zero.

This is useful as by convention unix commands return 0 on success or any other integer code to map to specific error conditions.

Upgrading FreeBSD Bastille Jails

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:02:16 -0700

Upgrading BastilleBSD jails…

Mostly uneventful… I did need a rescue from pkg-static before pkg update/upgrade would work.

root@bastille-host:/ # bastille list
 JID Name Boot Prio State Type IP Address Published Ports Release Tags
 1 random-jail on 99 Up thin 192.168.27.10 - 14.3-RELEASE-p6 -
root@bastille-host:/ # bastille stop random-jail

[random-jail]:
random-jail: removed
root@bastille-host:/ # vi /usr/local/bastille/jails/random-jail/fstab

root@bastille-host:/usr/local/bastille/jails/random-jail # bastille start random-jail

[random-jail]:
random-jail: created
root@bastille-host:/usr/local/bastille/jails/random-jail #

root@bastille-host:/ # bastille list
 JID Name Boot Prio State Type IP Address Published Ports Release Tags
 1 random-jail on 99 Up thin 192.168.27.10 - 15.0-RELEASE -

root@bastille-host:/ # bastille console random-jail

[random-jail]:
root@random-jail:~ # pkg update
ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libutil.so.9" not found, required by "pkg"
root@random-jail:~ # pkg-static bootstrap
pkg-static: Warning: Major OS version upgrade detected. Running "pkg bootstrap -f" recommended
pkg(8) already installed, use -f to force.
root@random-jail:~ # pkg-static bootstrap -f
pkg-static: Warning: Major OS version upgrade detected. Running "pkg bootstrap -f" recommended
pkg(8) is already installed. Forcing reinstallation through pkg(7).
The package management tool is not yet installed on your system.
Do you want to fetch and install it now? [y/N]: y
Bootstrapping pkg from pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/FreeBSD:15:amd64/quarterly, please wait...
Verifying signature with trusted certificate pkg.freebsd.org.2013102301... done
[random-jail] Installing pkg-2.4.2...
package pkg is already installed, forced install
[random-jail] Extracting pkg-2.4.2: 100%

Then out with the old base:

1Password ssh agent config...

Wed, 03 Dec 2025 16:48:43 -0700

If you’re doing SSH keys right… they tend to accumulate…

Keys unique to various environments or even specific hosts
Rotation (new keys generated, old keys deprecated and phased out)
They just pile-up and quickly!

This leads to eventual sadness:

sign_and_send_pubkey: signing failed for ED25519 "key-abc" from agent: agent refused operation
Received disconnect from 10.x.x.1 port 22:2: Too many authentication failures

I’ve mentioned this problem to ChatGPT from time to time and it has historically hallucinated promising but ultimately disapointingly nonsense “solutions.”

FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 20:44:41 -0700

Upgraded my FreeBSD system to 15.0-RELEASE

Watch out for that second run of freebsd-update that removes the prior libs… Seems that broke sudo as the pkg didn’t get upgraded (yet).

FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE (GENERIC) releng/15.0-n280995-7aedc8de6446
% uptime
 8:42PM up 54 mins, 4 users, load averages: 0.65, 0.96, 1.33
% sudo bastille list
ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libutil.so.9" not found, required by "sudo"
%

Deleting and re-installing pulled in the compatibility packages and got things sorted:

Automation, I dig it!

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

…and just like that, we’re live with automated publishing. I commit to git and a CICD pipeline authenticates over OIDC and deploys to an S3 bucket that serves as an origin for CloudFront. The domain is hosted on Route53 using DNS records created and maintained by Terraform.

I push… content gets published. What more can you want? I think this is going to work out just fine, indeed!

Assemble an MS-DOS .COM binary with DEBUG.EXE

Tue, 11 Nov 2025 14:57:43 -0700

The 8-Bit Guy has a video where he demonstrates the assembler built right into the monitor ROM on a C64.

This fascinated me and made me wonder… If I was stuck on an old MS-DOS machine and wanted to assemble a binary… Could I do it? Byte by byte? With what tool? Those of us stuck with “IBM compatible” PCs didn’t have no fancy monitor ROMs.

Turns out MS-DOS’ DEBUG.EXE is and was entirely up for the job.

ARM code for IPv4 Subnetting

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

ARM ASM code to find the network of an IP

ASCII case bit twiddling

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 21:49:28 -0700

If you pay a special sort of attention, you may notice that the upper-case and lower-case alphabet characters on the ASCII table are always exactly offset from each other by 32.

For example, upper-case A is 65, while the lowercase a is 97

As such the way the binary place value works out, you can manipulate the case of a character by setting or clearing the sixth bit… (2^5 = 32, we start counting bits and everything at 0, we’re programmers!)

Decimal 32 expressed as hexadecimal is 0x20 and expressed as binary is 00100000

Environment variables

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 23:29:21 -0700

I had the sudden realization that I didn’t really know how environment variables work. I think We all take them for granted, regardless of OS…

Some high level details about some such variables and their purpose can be found in the FreeBSD Handbook section 3.9. Shells.

You can view such variables in your shell using the env command:

root@freebsd:~ # env
PAGER=less
LANG=C.UTF-8
MAIL=/var/mail/root
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/root/bin
ENV=/root/.shrc
OLDPWD=/
PWD=/root
TERM=xterm-256color
USER=root
HOME=/root
SHELL=/bin/sh
MM_CHARSET=UTF-8
BLOCKSIZE=K
root@freebsd:~ #

…but what are all the low level specifics that nobody bothers to ask?

Initialize your variables

Sat, 17 Aug 2024 15:51:13 -0700

There’s no shortage of material that explains variables in C should be initialized… but I’ve often found the explanation of why to be somewhat lacking.

Where do the initial values of a variable come from if you don’t explicitly initialize?

Guess the number...

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A quick demonstration of how one can use a debugger to interactively inspect variables in a running program…

Patching Binaries

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 11:19:00 -0600

Exercise Summary

The idea of this self-inflicted exercise was to see if I could inspect and patch a binary to change the outcome of some conditional code. In days of long past up I had found tutorials on how to patch a binary to bypass copyright protection schemes. The type that would ask a random question, where the answer found in a manual.

You know, the one you would have had if the game wasn’t recieved on bootleg floppy diskettes.