Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Disable Dark Mode for Outlook in OSX?!

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Yes, after the latest update MS Office is now also capable of supporting the OSX Dark Mode. Nice, but rather annoying for MS Outlook I must say, the dark mode just makes reading the different panes very challenging. I went looking for an option in the UI that allowed me to change the default, I couldn’t find it, unfortunately, but I did find a way to disable it through the command line. For MS Outlook, in particular, this is how you do it:

defaults write com.microsoft.Outlook NSRequiresAquaSystemAppearance -bool yes

You can do this for other apps as well if you want, simply change the identifier string of Outlook (com.microsoft.Outlook) with the string of the app you want to disable it for. If you don’t know the string you can do the following to find it:

osascript -e 'id of app "Outlook"'

In the above example, I am looking for the identifier of Outlook, but this could be “Spotify” or anything else as well of course. Figured I would share this, as I found myself searching for half an hour.

New book: VMware vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive

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Cormac Hogan and I have been working late nights and weekends over the past months to update our vSAN book material. Thanks Cormac, it was once again a pleasure working with you on this project! As you may know, we released two versions of a vSAN based book through VMware Press. The book was titled vSAN Essentials. As mentioned before, after restructuring and rewriting a lot of the content we felt that the title of the book didn’t match the content, so we decided to rebrand it to vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive. After receiving very thorough reviews by Frank Denneman and Pete Koehler (Thanks guys!) we managed to complete it this week after we added a great foreword by our business unit’s SVP and General Manager, Yanbing Li.

Cormac and I decided to take the self-publishing route for this book, which allows us to set a great price for the ebook and enable the Amazon matchbook option, giving everyone who buys the paper version through Amazon the option to buy the e-book with a nice discount! As prices will vary based on location I am only going to list the USD prices. Please check your local Amazon website for localized prices. Oh, and before I forget, I would like to recommend buying the ebook flavor! Why? Well:

“On average, each printed book releases 8.85 pounds of carbon dioxide into the environment. Together, the newspaper and book-printing industries cut down 125 million trees per year and emit 44 million tons of CO2.”

We appreciate all support, but we prefer the cleanest option from an environmental stance, this is also the reason we priced the ebook a lot cheaper than the paper version. Anyway, here are the links to the US store, we hope you enjoy the content, and of course as always an Amazon review would be appreciated! Interestingly, it seems we already reached number 1 in the category Virtualization and the category Storage before this announcement, thanks everyone, we really appreciate it!

 

UPDATE:

It appears that some Amazon stores take a bit longer to index the content, so listing all the different versions below for the different stores that sell it:

SSH on OSX Mojave failing with broken pipe error

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I recently upgraded my Macbook to OSX Mojave (10.14.1). Ever since I upgraded whenever I want to open an SSH session to any server on the internal (VMware) network I would receive the following error message:

packet_write_wait: connection to x.y.z. port 22: broken pipe

Very annoying as it made deploying labs in our dev cloud very complicated. I googled around and there were many suggestions on how to solve this, but none worked so far. A colleague today pointed me to thread on VMTN (surprisingly) which describes how to solve the problem. it is very simple, just add “ssh -o IPQoS=throughput” to your normal ssh command. So something like the following:

ssh -o IPQoS=throughput root@192.168.1.1

Thanks Alex for the pointer, and thanks Quinn for posting the solution on VMTN! Oh, and yes you can add the following to your ~/.ssh/config so that you don’t have the use the -o flag everytime:

Host *
IPQoS=throughput

Black Friday Gift: Free copy of the vSphere 6.7 Clustering Deep Dive, thanks Rubrik (ebook)

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Many asked us if the ebook would be made available for free again. Today I have the pleasure of announcing that Frank, Niels and I have worked once again with Rubrik and the VMUG organization to make the vSphere 6.7 Clustering Deep Dive book available for free! Yes, that is 0 USD / EURO, or whatever your currency is. As the book signing at VMworld was wildly popular, which resulted in the follow up discussion about the ebook.

You want a copy? All that we expect you to do is register on Rubrik’s website using your own email address. Anyway, register and start your download engines, pick up a fresh copy of the vSphere Clustering Deep Dive here!

vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive book coming soon!

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Cormac and I decided to update the vSAN Essentials book. We added a whole bunch of extra info and also decided to rebrand it. “Essentials” did not really cut it, it is much more than that. Considering I just finished the Clustering Deep Dive with Frank and Niels, we figured this could be a nice addition to that series, complementing both the Host Deep Dive as well as the Clustering Deep Dive. We’ve received all the feedback from our reviewers, Frank Denneman and Pete Koehler, and spend various evenings digesting and processing it. Now it is just a matter of adding the foreword to the book, and then we can simply press: Publish. Hopefully, within 2 weeks, I will have a new article that details how you can buy the book!

The plan is right now to release the paper copy and the ebook at the same time, we will link the books, so those who buy the paper copy can buy the ebook at a discounted price. We will also make sure the ebook is priced very attractive, as we feel it should be the format of choice for everyone!