Alan Siu's Blog

  • Minimal bootstrapping with Munki

    If you are using Munki to manage your Mac fleet’s software installs, you may want to leverage bootstrapping, wherein Munki, at the login window, keeps installing items, rebooting as necessary, installing more items, and rebooting more if necessary… until all the items are installed. If your infrastructure for this is sophisticated, you may already be…

  • Surprise! Deleting macOS’s /tmp directory can break things…

    System Integrity Protection Macs have something called System Integrity Protection (also known as SIP), which means certain critical directories and files can’t be deleted, even as root. Even the /Applications/Chess.app can’t be deleted because of SIP. ls -ldO /System/Applications/Chess.app drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel restricted 96 Sep 30 21:10 /System/Applications/Chess.app See that restricted in there? It…

  • Getting the macOS selected Region via command line

    When you set up your Mac for the first time, Setup Assistant will ask you for your preferred language and region. In the graphical user interface (GUI), you can later find (and change) these settings in System Settings > General > Language & Region. But what if you want to find them in the command-line…

  • AutoPkg recipe override inputs and updated trust info

    What can be the issue with recipe override inputs? When you make a recipe override in AutoPkg, your override will have actual overrides and also parent trust info If the parent recipe has critical changes, usually you can update the trust info, and your override should work fine. In theory, critical parts of the recipe…

  • Some basics on switching from DEPNotify to swiftDialog

    DEPNotify is a program that allows you to display a little progress screen while a Mac is getting set up via MDM and/or Munki (or some other scripts). Even though there aren’t any major security issues (as of this writing) with DEPNotify, it’s also not being maintained, and it’s currently (again, as of this writing)…

  • Terminal Secure Keyboard Entry and sudo with Touch ID on macOS

    At one point or another, you may have discovered that you can enable Touch ID for sudo in the macOS terminal. You used to have to manually edit the /etc/pam.d/sudo file after every macOS update to re-enable it, but now you can keep it enabled permanently. When you have Touch ID enabled for sudo, you…

  • launchctl “new” subcommand basics for macOS

    launchd For services running in the background (or foreground), macOS uses launchd (think cron jobs on Linux or scheduled tasks on Windows). Legacy Subcommands If you’ve been managing Macs for a while, you may be familiar with a particular syntax for loading launchd. For launch agents (usually run as user), you may typically have launched…

  • Using Touch ID for sudo on macOS… even after installing an OS update

    For a while, you were able to use Touch ID for sudo on macOS by editing the /etc/pam.d/sudo file to have a line like auth sufficient pam_tid.so In previous macOS versions, that file would get overwritten when you updated (say, from 13.6 to 13.6.1), but in macOS 14 (Sonoma) and supposedly in future versions, you…

  • Comparing macOS versions using Python

    At some point in a Python script, you may want to compare macOS versions (or, really, any software versions) to each other. Back in the day, you could use Python’s LooseVersion from distutils.version, but that’s now deprecated: >>> from distutils.version import LooseVersion >>> LooseVersion(‘14.0.0’) > LooseVersion(‘14.0’) True >>> LooseVersion(‘14.0.0’) == LooseVersion(‘14.0’) False >>> LooseVersion(‘14.0’) >…

  • UseAdditionalHttpHeaders preference for MunkiReport 5.8.0

    Extra preference to consider If you use authorization headers for your Mac clients to communicate with your MunkiReport server and are upgrading from MunkiReport 5.7.1 (which still uses Python 2) to MunkiReport 5.8.0 (which uses Python 3), be aware that there is an additional preference to set if you want your headers to be used:…

  • Notes on connecting a Cloud Function to Cloud SQL

    Caveat I’m not a Google Cloud Platform expert, and this isn’t a tutorial. I’m just hoping that if people run into the same errors I ran into and search for those exact error messages, that they’ll find this blog post, and maybe it’ll be helpful to them. What I found Making the connection Google’s documentation…

  • How to use Google Apps Script to get data from a connected data sheet

    Regular sheets are straightforward For a regular Google Sheets spreadsheet, it’s fairly easy to use Google Apps Script to get the data contained on a worksheet:     var spreadsheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActive();     var regularsheet = spreadsheet.getSheets()[0];     var range = regularsheet.getDataRange();     var values = range.getValues();     for ( j = 0; j < values.length; j++ ){         Logger.log(values[j][0] + ':…

  • Using Munki to “nudge” for Rapid Security Response updates (like 13.3.1 (a))

    For many MacAdmins, Nudge has been an amazing tool for bothering users to update their Macs to the latest patch. Apple threw a wrench in things by the way it implemented the 13.3.1 (a) Rapid Security Response update, so Nudge doesn’t currently (as of this writing) support Rapid Security Response updates. There would be challenges…

  • Extracting icons from Assets.car on macOS

    Acknowledgements Thanks to Karen Garner for bringing this problem to my attention, and thanks to Mike Lynn for showing the solution. I’m just expanding on the solution a bit using a specific example. Problem Sometimes, when you look in an app bundle on macOS, you see an .icns file in Contents/Resources, and you can use…

  • Testing a local timezone deadline in Nudge

    In the past year, there have been several requests to have Nudge support local time zones instead of UTC: Feature request: Support the local timezone UTC vs Local Time Feature request: use system local time instead of time for a specific time zone (e.g., Z / GMT) Turns out, as Kevin M. Cox explains in…