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Simon 5 is coming soon!

Simon version 5 is currently in beta testing. It is a massive update, introducing a much-requested feature: syncing the Simon data between multiple Macs, plus a Simon Status service, a Link Checker filter, improved Find filter, iMessage and Speak Error notifiers, a new app icon, and much more.

Important: please note that Simon 5 requires a minimum of macOS 10.12 (Sierra), and will be a paid upgrade from Simon 4 after the beta. Purchasers since September 1, 2020 automatically get a version 5 license (that also works in previous versions).

Read the blog for details.

Need Long Auto Pause

Sat, 2018-07-21 09:19 — JohnDCCIU

I have a server that gets shut down for a long backup once a week, starting at 6pm on Friday and it goes until Sunday morning.

I can't figure out how to get the Simon test to Auto Pause for that long without glitching out and starting to issue bogus warnings.

I've tried setting the Autu Pause on Friday from 6pm to 12am/11:59pm, 1am, etc, with various tries at similar settings on Saturday and Sunday, but inevitably the test turns itself back on.

How can I get Simon to pause for an extended period of time?

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Sat, 2018-07-21 16:25 — David Sinclair
David Sinclair's picture

Re: Need Long Auto Pause

You can add multiple auto pauses to a test, so you could have one for Friday from 6 PM to midnight, and another for weekends. Or one for all day Saturday, and a third for Sunday from midnight to the appropriate time that morning.

Sat, 2018-07-21 17:12 — JohnDCCIU
JohnDCCIU's picture

Re: Need Long Auto Pause

Sorry my message wasn't clear: that's what I did...but it doesn't seem to work.

I added Friday from 6pm to 12am and Saturday from 12am to 12am, and Sunday from 12am to 11am.

In case there was some kind of collision at midnight between the various days, I tried the end times as 11:59pm, but that also didn't work. Inevitably, the test reactivates at midnight and alerts.

Sat, 2018-07-21 18:27 — David Sinclair
David Sinclair's picture

Re: Need Long Auto Pause

Hmm, that should have worked. You could try adding more auto-pause rows to overlap the midnight time, e.g. 11 PM to 1 AM. Shouldn't be necessary, and may not help, but could be worth trying.

Sun, 2018-07-22 08:10 — JohnDCCIU
JohnDCCIU's picture

Re: Need Long Auto Pause

Ok, I tried that; we'll see what happens next weekend.

Sat, 2018-07-28 06:44 — JohnDCCIU
JohnDCCIU's picture

Re: Need Long Auto Pause

Didn't work. :-( Started alerting at 1am Saturday, when the second (overlapping) Friday auto-pause (11pm to 1am) expired. Saturday was set to auto-pause from 12:00am to 11pm.

Sat, 2018-07-28 08:08 — David Sinclair
David Sinclair's picture

Re: Need Long Auto Pause

Hmm. Sorry about that. I'll make a note to investigate when next working on Simon.

In the meantime, all I can suggest is (a) ignore the bogus notifications, (b) manually pause for the weekend, or (c) add a Script-based filter to change the failure to unchanged if the date is a weekend.

Tue, 2018-09-11 11:32 — David Sinclair
David Sinclair's picture

Re: Need Long Auto Pause

FYI, this has been addressed in Simon 4.3b1.

Tue, 2018-09-18 02:01 — JohnDCCIU
JohnDCCIU's picture

Re: Need Long Auto Pause

[Edited] I asked where the beta was, but then I RTFS and there it was. ;-)