Thread by @patio11

"Ah I will just quickly make a change to that old hobby project. Let me boot up the VM which has the only working development environment for this 2012-era Rails app."

*VM fails to boot on M1 Macbook*

"Oh no."

That was an hour or two ago, and I've been untangling the dependency tree to find some combination of software which is young enough to run on this processor but doesn't have total incompatibility with e.g. Rails 3.2.21.

I had finally gotten through fiddling with a bunch of gem versions, bundle installed successfully, DB re-created successfully, tried to install the seed data and then:

Now it has been a long, long time since I've done Ruby development on a daily basis, but I seem to remember that disagreements about the contract for Integer bubbling up from your web framework mean you're about to have a very, very bad day.

Currently wondering if I should just bite the bullet and buy a new computer to be able to run the old VM and save myself pain here.

Is this thread going anywhere? No, not really. This is one of those days I hate everything about computers. Save yourself, there is still time.

Hmm since I still have a working server on a VPS I wonder if I can clone the VPS, drop the DB, switch to development mode, rehydrate the DB, and then use the new VPS as my new VM...

thisisfine.gif

The current strategy involves a) upgrading to a newer version of VMWare to b) use their ovftool (the only one running on Mac required a new Fusion license) to c) convert the VM to an OVF to d) upload to DigitalOcean and make a VPS which I will e) SSH into to install Microsoft...

Remote Desktop from the command line then f) Remote Desktop from Microsoft's Mac app into the Linux VPS to access the dev environment that I know works, effectively turning the cloud server into a somewhat slower-than-locally-hosted VM.

...

I LOVE TECHNOLOGY.

Holy #*%(#%*( this actually worked.

Now I'm just connected via a relatively slow pipe to Singapore to do the thing I used to do locally.

Hmm should I force upgrade ubuntu precise to ubuntu bionic.

"How disruptive could that possibly be..."

(Yay for snapshots.)

Sorry, my lovingly artisianlly maintained "pet" devbox from 2006 through 2015ish: you are now officially "cattle."

After approximately 6 cumulative hours of DevOps (not counting upload time for about 100gb of images) I have successfully made a trivial edit to my old-as-the-hills side project!

I feel irrationally accomplished.