My Little Pocket Universe
Scott Garrett In setting up Zabbix to monitor my devices, I had to look up how to set up SNMP in VMware. My first mistake was assuming that vCenter, the central management system for VMware, would actually centrally manage SNMP. It does not. From what I can tell, you cannot set up SNMP from the GUI, and … Read more
The Ubiquiti UDM Pro is, over all, a fantastic device. But they did make some spectacularly bad design decisions for a device that claims to be for the enterprise. Anything and everything to do with DNS they chose … poorly. For one thing, they designed it so the client chooses its own hostname. This is … Read more
Sometimes, especially with Monterey, I have had iCloud file syncing hang where it shows there are files that need to be uploaded, but for whatever reason it stops uploading the files; sometimes for a couple of hours, sometimes completely. And, of course it will do this when I have other projects open I don’t want … Read more
So you’ve bought that shiny 3D Blu-Ray, but they don’t make 3D TVs anymore. Now you have that shiny new VR headset, which just screams “Let me play my 3D movies!,” but alas, no such luck. Well, here is how to extract your purchased Blu-Rays (only use these instructions with movies you own, please!). You … Read more
If you ever have an app that seems to be having problems launching, you can quickly check the integrity with the spctl command: spctl –assess -vv /Applications/<Application>.app As an example, if I wanted to check the integrity of Handbrake (a kick-ass video encoder), the command would be: spctl –assess -vv /Applications/HandBrake.app The output you should … Read more
MacOS has a nice facility as part of its DNS resolver that allows you to have a per-domain set of DNS servers. This is especially useful when using VPN services where you still need to use your local resolvers as well as the remote resolvers. Unfortunately, there is nowhere in the GUI to do this, … Read more
Sometimes you will end up with a linux host that is swapping, and many times it will be obvious which process has been chewing up swap (hint: it is always java). But in those cases where it is not as apparent, I whipped up a little bash script to walk the process tree and list … Read more
Linux has great facilities to view what is happening with the hardware and kernel, but the information isn’t always in one place or organized for humans to look at. Seeing the fibre channel HBAs and the attached devices is a prime example. Getting a quick view is a royal pain. Here is a bash script … Read more
Unfortunately, since the last OS update for the Mac (Monterey), QuickLook has become especially unstable, especially on my M1 Mac Mini. It doesn’t cause crashes or anything, it simply stops working; especially with video files. However there is a simple solution to the problem. From the Terminal, just run the command (you do not need … Read more
To add an extra layer of security to your server, especially when you are working on a shared client, you can add SSHFP records to the DNS record of the host. This allows the ssh client to pull the hash of the server from DNS to add an extra layer of verification that the host … Read more