Zsoldier's Tech Blog

Summary: Work from home doesn't mean you should be on 24/7, which is why MacOS's "Do Not Disturb" function is great.  What's not great is that not all apps on MacOS respect it.  Microsoft Outlook for MacOS is one of them.  I've put in a bug/feature request for it to natively respect MacOS do not disturb.  In the meantime, you can make use of MacOS Automator silence your system based on a calendar trigger. It's no fun having anything that isn't muted going off in the middle of the night.  Below can be used to basically mute your system.  You can also have Automator close Outlook, but I've found that muting the system instead will catch any other application offenders that do not respect MacOS's do not disturb function.  Not to mention the dreaded, "Would you like to save this?" message that prevents the app from closing. Workaround: Launch MacOS Automator, you can find it in your Applications Folder. Create your Automator task type by ...

Summary: I bought a new macbook pro and typical behavior is to use time machine to restore.  This method is perfectly acceptable 99% of the time.  Those that mess w/ kext, sudoers, and other jazz... not so much.  I originally did a time machine restore, but that brought over a mess of things that I quite frankly had forgotten about (I like to tinker) and that was unfair to my new macbook.  Needless to say, but I bricked my new macbook which led me to  Konmari my setup. Details: Then there is the portability aspect of my terminal environment that I've been so lacking.  In combination w/ Dropbox, I'm able to move this stuff around and keep things in sync much easier now. Basically restoring bash/zsh alias is a pain.  Modifying any of these things is also a hassle.  So I developed a shell script that will basically take files that exist in my Dropbox directory and symlink the original files back to Dropbox. This way I can simply run th...

Summary: I've been dealing w/ issues on Emulex OCe11102-FM logging out of the vSAN Fabric and not recovering. Long story short, it's been a firmware problem and I was able to get a alpha firmware that fixed the issue. In the meantime, I had created a PowerCLI script to auto-remediate every hour if a degraded path was detected.  I wasn't fond of the solution, so I looked to vCenter alarms to see if I could have them do it for me.  Turns out they can, but there are caveats to this approach. What follows is an example of how to set something like this up and details specific to the errors/configuration I was dealing with.