Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

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I've been playing with iSH and aShell on my iPad. I'm not particularly happy with them and there seems to be a big lack of documentation (e.g. the `mount -t ios idintmatter dest` was quite odd and I think surprising to anyone that's terminally terminal)

Idk if I'll feel comfortable jailbreaking a new 16, but yeah apple is fucking weird.

  ==== Apple engineers, I know you're here ====

What the fuck guys? I want to throw a match case into my ssh config based on the SSID of the network I'm on (I can't rely on IP being static).

  - Airport
    Deprecated. 
  
  - networksetup
    Not associated with AirPort network

  - wdutil 
    Not only requires sudo, but you redact the SSID. To a root user‽‽‽
  
  - ioreg -ln Airport driver | perl -lne 'print $1 if $_ =~ /IO80211SSID.*"(.*)"/;'
    Redacted
 
  - system_profiler SPAirPortDataType | awk '/Current Network/ {getline;$1=$1;print $0 | "tr -d ':'";exit}' 
    Takes 10 seconds to run but at least it fucking works and doesn't require sudo!

       What
           The
              ᵃⁿᵈ ⁱ ᵈᵒⁿ'ᵗ ᵐᵉᵃⁿ ᵗʰⁱˢ ˡⁱᵍʰᵗˡʸ
                  FUCK
                      ‽‽‽

Seriously! What is going on here? Why are you __hostile__ to shell users‽ I don't know how to tell you that knowing the SSID of a machine that you already have access to is not a security risk. Seriously, what is going on here? I have a dozen ways to do this on Linux and you redact it with a sudo command but not with a user level command? Come on..... Have some balls and stand up to your bosses

Try `ipconfig getsummary en0`. It's instant on my machine and dumps plenty of info about the current state of the connection, including the SSID and BSSID.

THANKS!!!!!! This works!

I have been amazed at how little information there is about this. Maybe I just don't know the right areas to look. But I tried google, reddit, stack, several LLMs[0] and never once did I come across ipconfig. Where should I be looking?

[0] Of course LLMs were just repeating the same stuff as reddit and SO and would continually forget that airplay got deprecated despite being in the prompt and me telling them multiple times after it suggested it over and over....

I use Windows, Mac, and Linux systems regularly, and frequently get ipconfig and ifconfig mixed up. So I was vaguely aware that both commands existed on macOS and your comment prompted me to try both to see if either exposed the SSID.

Makes sense. I'm mostly a Linux person myself, but strongly prefer a Mac laptop over a Windows laptop.

And for those that just want SSID, try either of these

  ipconfig getsummary en0 | grep -e '[^B]SSID' | cut -d " " -f5
  ipconfig getsummary en0 | grep -e '[^B]SSID' | sed -E 's/^.*: (.*)/\1/g'

Second will be better if your SSID has a space in it for some reason. You'll also be able to grab the domain name if you want it for similar reasons.

Split horizon DNS can help you solve this for all services, not just ssh, and not be at the whims of Apple.

Thanks, I didn't know any this. I'll look into it more.

But I'm still just confused by the decisions being made over at Apple. I understand hand holding those who don't know much but they do realize that the reason their device is so common among engineers is because it's not too dissimilar from Linux, right? Why attack power users? What's being gained? That's what I don't get.

I long ago concluded that the overlap with Apple products and power tech user desires was a happy coincidence, and/or a hangover of their past, rather than an indication of their future.

The Mac is the exception in their current product lineup: every other platform is heavily locked down, and the user’s behaviour heavily restricted.

I strongly believe the Mac is heading in the same direction. See the progression from run what you want, to optional signing of binaries, to right click to run unsigned things, to disable a setting to be able to run unsigned binaries; or “worse”, the way spctl and csrutil no longer function after deploying Sequoia.

I mean I hate Windows more and that's the choice unfortunately. I'd love a Linux arm book though.

I do think part of the problem is not enough engineers asking their bosses why. Or not enough engineers thinking decisions through. I hope to god it's not a lack of engineers that are power users because that's even worse in many ways, but I wouldn't be surprised.

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