Alan Siu's Blog

Author: alanysiu

  • What I learned upgrading from MunkiReport 2 to MunkiReport 3

    The setup for the old (version 2) MunkiReport was fairly simple. You essentially just downloaded the folder to your web server. The setup for the new (version 3) MunkiReport has a bit more nuance to it. I had a lot of trouble setting it up, but thanks to some help from other Mac admins (special…

  • Backing up database data from a Crypt server

    This is really just a step-by-step version of what’s available in the July 2015 update doc, which links to Django dumpdata and loaddata. If you want back up your Crypt server database, this is how you can dump the data out: docker ps to find the name of your docker container, in case you forgot…

  • Upgrading to High Sierra: “You may not install this volume because the computer is missing a firmware partition”

    If you try to upgrade to High Sierra (macOS 10.13) and get You may not install this volume because the computer is missing a firmware partition when trying to select your drive to upgrade, it may be because you’re upgrading on an OWC drive. If you’re using Munki, the error may appear in your /Library/Managed…

  • Parental Controls keeps blocking allowed apps

    If macOS Parental Controls keep blocking allowed apps (both allowed through the checklist in System Preferences and through manually approving via password), deleting the account and recreating it may not be enough to fix the glitch. Instead, try recreating an account with a new name. I’ve found Santa to block things more reliably (or not…

  • Handling cfqueryparam errors in ColdFusion queries

    <cfqueryparam> is ColdFusion’s way of fighting against SQL injection attacks. If, however, you just put <cfqueryparam> in your SQL or MySQL query, people entering the wrong type of input will get a server-side error message, which will make them think your website is messed up instead of realizing they put in the wrong type of…

  • Preventing alarms from going off on MDM’ed iPads

    If you have alarms set on iPads (either an actual alarm or an alarm from the “bedtime” portion of the Alarm app), you can’t disable the alarm by blocking the app. All blocking the app does is prevent the user from launching up the app. To prevent the alarm itself from going off, you have…

  • Bulk-extracting and combining audio from .mov to .mp3

    If you aren’t able to use an audio recording app on your iPad for whatever reason and need to resort to using the Camera app to record audio (long story), you will get a bunch of .MOV files. So I wrote up a script that employs ffmpeg to extract just the audio from each file…

  • CrashPlan 6.5 stuck on Connecting… and never times out

    We had a couple of clients who would just never do an initial connection to CrashPlan after the upgrade from CrashPlan 4 to CrashPlan 6.5. But they would never time out or give an error message either. Restarting the CrashPlan service didn’t help. Restarting the computer didn’t help. Uninstalling and reinstalling the client didn’t help.…

  • Considerations when upgrading CrashPlan with Munki

    I had a great workflow for installing CrashPlan with Munki for older versions of CrashPlan (we were on versions 3 and 4 before). We recently made the jump to CrashPlan 6.5, though, and that workflow no longer applies. Now you have to use a deploy.properties file instead of custom.properties and userInfo.sh files. We had some…

  • Don’t store your munkipkg files in Google Drive File Stream

    If you’re using munkipkg, don’t store your munkipkg files in Google Drive File Stream‘s mounted volume. You may get weird permissions issues in your .pkgs or hidden files that mess up your built packages.

  • Selecting a startup disk when you put a firmware password on a Windows single-boot Mac

    Usually, when you put a firmware password on a Mac, you can double-check in System Preferences > Startup Disk to see if the proper startup disk (or any startup disk) is selected. Since the default behavior of the firmware password is you needing to enter the password in order to boot from anything other than…

  • BlacklistRegex and WhitelistRegex on Santa

    Acknowledgements Thanks once again to @bur on the Mac Admins Slack for the info I’m documenting here. BlacklistRegex and WhitelistRegex In a previous blog entry, I talked about using Santa to block apps by certificate (and I briefly mentioned blocking by binary). You can also block by path using regular expressions. Binary takes precedence over…

  • Using Santa to block an .app

    Acknowledgements Special shoutout to @bur on the Mac Admins Slack for help with some command-line syntax. Santa can be complicated, but doesn’t need to be Google has a project on GitHub called Santa, which is quite powerful and complicated. As the project’s readme says, though: Documentation: This is currently limited.. I just wanted to do…

  • If munkiimport doesn’t generate an installer_item_hash in the pkginfo file

    If you notice that running munkiimport on a .dmg doesn’t result in an installer_item_hash generating, you might want to also run makepkginfo on that .dmg to double-check it’s read-only: makepkginfo /PATH/TO/REPO/pkgs/PROBLEMITEM.dmg WARNING: /PATH/TO/REPO/pkgs/PROBLEMITEM.dmg is a writable disk image. Checksum verification is not supported. WARNING: Consider converting /PATH/TO/REPO/pkgs/PROBLEMITEM.dmg to a read-only diskimage.

  • “Grant access” problem when trying to open Word docs

    If you’re trying to open a Word doc, and it keeps saying you don’t have permission (even when you own the document), asking you to grant access to the document, and then still not giving you access; then just quit out of Word completely, and then launch it up again. The document should open fine…