macOS

This afternoon I was doing some network maintenance around the house. While inspecting all of my wireless clients, I happened to find a host that I didn't recognize (I name all of my hosts with Aliases in my Ubiquiti network and this guy stuck out like a sore thumb being named with just a MAC address). Usually I can figure out what host it is by looking at the Manufacturer (the first 24 bits of the 48-bit MAC, or the Organizational Unique Identifier (OUI)). In this case it was A8:1B:6A which maps to Texas Instruments. Ubiquiti Device Information ScreenUnfortunately, Texas Instruments doesn't tell me much as they're a common manufacturer of NIC cards for all kids of IoT...

Recently I was invited to participate in the World of WarCraft, Battle for Azeroth Alpha Test. I know you're thrilled (I was too!). However, in order to install the game, it required 40GB of free Hard Disk space. I only had about 30GB free, so there was no way to install it. I have a 1,000 GB hard disk, but 200GB are partitioned for other operating systems, I have over 300GB of Music, and then all my other files take up quite a bit of space. However, I've been running low on space for a while, so I decided to see if I could fix the problem, install the game, and learn something about the Mac along the way....

I recently decided to run Kali Linux on my MacBook. I originally thought I'd just build it into a Virtual Machine (using Parallels), but was concerned that I might not have the control over the hardware that I'd need in order to make Kali effective as a learning environment. So, I set about working on a dual-boot scenario. Needless to say, I failed miserably when I opted to have Kali install Grub and it overwrote my primary Boot Manager on the Mac and rendered the system unbootable (and eventually unrecoverable). Thank goodness for good backups... WARNING: Do not proceed with any of these steps unless you have the ability to restore a bare-metal backup. Everything I'm doing has the potential...