netjibbing.com

Optimizing MacPorts with the fcix.net Mirror

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 21:00:00 -0800

MacPorts is a powerful package manager for macOS, but by default it uses Fastly CDN infrastructure which can be slow for users in the United States. By configuring MacPorts to use the fcix.net mirror, you can significantly improve download speeds.

This guide covers the three configuration files needed to optimize your MacPorts installation for the fcix.net mirror, ensuring both port sources and binary archives are fetched from the fastest available source.

Packer Templates for macOS 15 and macOS 26 VMs with Tart

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 20:55:00 -0800

The packer_macOS_26 repository contains Packer templates for building customized macOS virtual machines using Tart, a macOS virtualization tool. These VMs are specifically designed to serve as base images for GitHub Actions self-hosted runners, particularly for the jibb-runners tool used in the BlakePorts repository.

Overview

This repository leverages pre-built vanilla images from the Cirrus Labs macOS Image Templates registry (ghcr.io/cirruslabs). The vanilla images provide a clean starting point with minimal customizations:

BlakePorts: A Personal MacPorts Repository with Legacy SSH Support

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 20:50:00 -0800

BlakePorts is my personal MacPorts repository that serves multiple purposes: maintaining custom ports, providing automated CI/CD workflows, and solving the challenge of connecting to legacy macOS systems that require deprecated SSH algorithms.

The Legacy SSH Problem

Modern macOS systems ship with OpenSSH 10+, which has removed support for older, less secure algorithms like ssh-rsa and diffie-hellman-group1-sha1. This creates a problem when you need to connect to legacy macOS systems (10.6-10.8) or older servers that still require these deprecated algorithms.

Packer Template for macOS 11+ on VMware Fusion

Sun, 24 Oct 2021 18:54:16 +0000

With the October 2021 update to this macOS packer template, it now supports 11.0.1 through 12.0 versions. Changing the username and password used to build the images is more straightforward, and quite a few new options have been parameterized.

One change I have been chasing for a while is approving the VMware tools kernel extension. This is a new requirement for macOS 11 and later. Apple encourages organizations to use MDM for that task. The approach I’m using with the customize part of the build is to boot the VM with SIP disabled and use GUI scripting to approve the kext.

Experiments With Arm64 VMs on AppleSilicon Mac

Fri, 27 Nov 2020 18:43:25 +0000

With the release of a new ARM based processer for Apple Mac computers, an interesting transition is happening. People who depend on using virtual machines for tasks will need to adapt to new requirements for running them. Aside from VMware Fusion, Parallels and qemu a few other options have popped up. In this post, I’ll share some details around SimpleVM which I have been looking at for a few weeks. SimpleVM is a minimum viable hypervisor.framework front end. Others have started posting changes to this tool to enable running arm64 native virtual machines in this post. https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ubuntu-linux-virtualized-on-m1-success.2270365/

Smoke time-lapse September 2020

Sat, 19 Sep 2020 20:15:20 +0000

This time-lapse is from September 10-19 2020 from my weathercam. It shows the progression of forrest fire spoke in the skys of Ballard WA.

Using macports from git source

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 20:36:53 +0000

I’m publishing this script that configures macports from the github source. This method gets you the ports base and ports themselvs from the master branch of git. I have found that using mac ports this way enables support for bleeding edge OS versions or CPU architectures.

Grab the code : https://github.com/trodemaster/macports

Usage

EXAMPLE

1 ./macports -ip

Running the script with these options will install macports and all the ports listed in the portfile. Setting up new systems or VMs with ports is fully automated with these options.