Darwin Management NIC Configurator

darwin-nic configures a USB Ethernet adapter for out-of-band management while preserving the host's normal Wi-Fi and tailnet path.

What It Owns

• USB NIC detection and ranking.
• Static USB management addressing.
• Wi-Fi/service-order preservation.
• Dry-run and status output before privileged changes.
• Bastion diagnostics for route state, scutil --nwi, Tailscale extension state, and recent macOS NECP socket drops.

Device-specific topology, credentials, switch commands, and recovery policy belong in downstream operator repositories.

For the public release shape and productionization summary, see the project spec.

Public artifact URLs:

• Docs: https://transscendsurvival.org/DarwinNicUtil/
• PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/darwin-mgmt-nic-configurator/
• GitHub Releases: https://github.com/Jesssullivan/DarwinNicUtil/releases
• FlakeHub: https://flakehub.com/f/Jesssullivan/DarwinNicUtil

Quick Start

# Recommended CLI install
uv tool install darwin-mgmt-nic-configurator
darwin-nic status

# Stable release from FlakeHub
nix run "https://flakehub.com/f/Jesssullivan/DarwinNicUtil/v2.1.2" -- status

Install Path Matrix

From a checkout:

uv sync --extra dev
uv run darwin-nic setup
uv run darwin-nic status

Workflow

flowchart LR
    A[USB NIC plugged in] --> B[Detect safe candidate]
    B --> C[Apply profile or CLI IPs]
    C --> D[Preserve Wi-Fi priority]
    D --> E[Add management route]
    E --> F[Report status and diagnostics]

Main Commands

Platform Status

Artifacts

The release path supports PyPI distributions, GitHub Release wheel/source files, Nix packages, FlakeHub releases, and MkDocs site artifacts. Standalone binary publication remains a tracked follow-up.