Three Macs and six accounts were done by hand, and the fourth would have
repeated every mistake the first three taught. This script carries them.
Each guard is something a hand-run got wrong first:
- an account may not own its own home. A `sudo mkdir` before sysadminctl
leaves /Users/<account> root-owned; the account then authenticates, gets a
shell, has a correct $HOME and cannot write to it. Surfaced on the Studio
as a bare "Permission denied" hours after the account looked fine.
- `sudo -u` keeps the CALLER's $HOME. Without -H the install's rm -rf aims at
the wrong account — it did, at a working install, and only permissions
stopped it. The remote half refuses to run unless $HOME matches the target.
- the provider ships a hard-coded model catalog that the web GUI reads
INDEPENDENTLY of agent-default-model, so a correct default still showed
DeepSeek models in the picker. `models:` replaces it.
- reasoningEffort / maxTokens / defaultContextWindow are all measured against
the seat; the harness defaults fail on every one.
- the key is scoped per machine and the scope is VERIFIED (200 on
gen-reasoning, 403 on gen), not trusted from the mint.
The first run found two more: it named the vault item after the IP
(`mac-10-0-10-10/`, unreadable beside esh-mac-studio) and its config check
used grep -A3 where the block needs -A4, so it printed an empty model and
passed anyway. Both fixed, and verification now asserts the model rather
than only the answer token — a check that cannot fail is not a check.
Run twice against the same account to confirm idempotence, then against
vhpfi. docs/runbooks/mac-provisioning.md carries the operator-run stage and
the traps that are not the script's to solve.
