Back in July, I wrote a post on how to set up split tunneling between Tailscale and a WireGuard VPN — in my case, Mullvad — on macOS. In general, it worked as desired, with all traffic going through Mullvad, except for Tailscale traffic. However, there were some limitations: I had to disable Tailscale DNS in order to prevent DNS leaks, so I had to access Tailscale hosts via their Tailscale IP addresses; I had to manually clear the DNS settings on all my interfaces after disconnecting from the VPN; and crucially, I never completely trusted that the VPN setup was leak-free. Let’s see if we can do better this time.
My Mac is set up to sync its light/dark mode with the local sunset, so it is in light mode through most of the day, and in dark mode later at night. All my apps sync with the system as well, including my terminal and terminal applications. However, what doesn’t sync is SSH sessions. If I SSH into one of my Mac Minis, and then run a command such as bat (which on my Mac is aliased to bat --theme=$(defaults read -globalDomain AppleInterfaceStyle &> /dev/null && echo Catppuccin-mocha || echo Catppuccin-latte) and thus respects dark mode), it always acts as if it is in dark mode (because the Mac Mini is in dark mode).
If you’re browsing my blog via the website and not solely through the RSS feed, you may have noticed something new at the bottom of every post. That’s right, the blog now supports comments! While that’s as simple as a toggle checkbox in some sites, due to this blog being a “static site”, it was much more involved.
As I’ve mentioned before, I have a bunch of Mac Minis running NixOS hosting various services. I have SSH access set up to them all with my SSH key, but I don’t have access to my GPG keys on those machines. And since these are the only NixOS machines that I have, things like updating my flake lockfile become annoyingly complicated:
As I mentioned in the previous post, I have two set-up Mac Minis dual-booting NixOS. Howver, because they’re so old, they’re really, really slow. When I had another service that I wanted to run (details to come), I decided to set up a third. One of NixOS’s strengths is that it’s very easy to deploy an identical machine. I was still getting used to NixOS when I set up my second machine, but now that I’m more comfortable (relatively speaking), I wanted to see how easy it was.
I have a collection of very old (pre-2010) Mac Minis, two of which are currently set up (dual-booting macOS and NixOS). The reason I kept the macOS partition is really just based on my superstition and the belief that if the Linux distro goes totally kaput, I’ll be able to rescue the machine from the macOS partition.
The first time you use sudo on a macOS system (it’s probably been so long you don’t even remember it!), you’re presented with the following dialog:
```
WARNING: Improper use of the sudo command could lead to data loss
or the deletion of important system files. Please double-check your
typing when using sudo. Type “man sudo” for more information.