Alan Siu's Blog

Author: alanysiu

  • Fixing Jamf device signature error

    Even though this Jamf Nation thread is five years old, as of this writing, it’s still got the solution to the Device Signature Error – A valid device signature is required to perform the action error message. In my experience, the actual working solution is to run sudo jamf enroll -prompt and then enter credentials…

  • Running commands as a user when scripting for Munki or Jamf

    Munki and Jamf run as root, so scripts they execute execute as root, not user. One great way around this is to use Outset‘s login scripts (login-once, login-every), but sometimes you may have occasion to actually run a script immediately as the logged-in user. Obviously, you’ll want to get the currently logged-in user into a…

  • Using a Munki nopkg to disable Chrome 80’s ScrollToTextFragment feature

    Update, 14 July 2020 With Chrome 84, Google has now removed the ability to disable the ScrollToTextFragment feature, so this whole write-up is now obsolete What is ScrollToTextFragment With Chrome 80, Google has introduced a new ScrollToTextFragment feature that allows you to reference an anchor link by any phrase that’s in a webpage, even if…

  • Fix for custom user icons freezing up System Preferences

    Even though there is some flexibility in terms of what sizes and resolutions you can use for custom user icons (to select for user pictures), if your icon’s resolution is way off, you may see a frozen blank, grey screen when trying to change the picture from that too-high-res picture to something else: To get…

  • Introduction to Nudge

    What is Nudge? In 2018, Erik Gomez created Nudge, which is open source and has nine other contributors as of this writing. Part of the beauty of Nudge is its simplicity—it doesn’t actually install any updates itself (it does invoke the softwareupdate binary to check for or download Apple software updates, but it doesn’t actually…

  • Upping the logging level in Munki

    As noted in the Troubleshooting section of the Munki wiki, you can increase the logging level for Munki clients. The default logging level is 1, which looks like this: Dec 12 2019 20:04:20 -0800 GoogleChrome version 79.0.3945.79 (or newer) is already installed. If you increase the logging level to 4, it will look like this:…

  • Yes, Munki’s makecatalogs runs on Linux

    You can’t run all of Munki‘s admin tools on Linux, because some of the things the tools use involve Mac-specific tools, which is why even Munki admins who host their Munki servers on a Linux server will use a Mac for things like munkiimport. You can, however, run makecatalogs on Linux, though. Here’s just a…

  • Using AutoPkg to distribute and test Munki 4 (or any new Munki version) in prerelease

    10 December, 2019 update: Munki 4 is now an official (not pre-) release, so the below instructions are for when the next version is in prerelease… 25 November, 2019 (original post) As of this writing, Munki 4 is in the late stages of testing (its current on release candidate 1), so if you want to…

  • Forcing updates to Google Chrome using Chrome preferences / a Chrome profile

    Why use Chrome relaunch notification instead of Munki I’m a huge fan of using Munki to patch software on macOS, but Munki is generally polite—it usually won’t kill an application while the user is using it. There is an option in Munki to force an install after a certain date, but that will log the…

  • Setting up Reposado without downloading Apple update pkgs

    Reposado allows you to set up your own local repo of Apple software updates. This can be handy if you want to control the flow of updates (having a testing branch, for example, and then promoting items from testing to production). With Apple deprecating custom catalog URLs in Catalina (they still work for now, though),…

  • Munki hack: force uninstall after a certain date

    Munki has an option to force install by a certain date (specifically, using the force_install_after_date key), but it doesn’t do a force uninstall after a certain date. You can make an item a managed uninstall, which means Munki will uninstall it when possible, but if that requires a logout or reboot, you don’t know when…

  • Using Munki to ignore Catalina upgrade in macOS

    Update: Apple has deprecated the –ignore flag, so this probably will never work again. Apple used to make you go out of your way to download an OS upgrade. Then, Apple started having those OS upgrade installers auto-download to the /Applications folder. Then Apple made it so OS upgrades appeared as regular updates. For Mac…

  • Scripting changing the user picture in macOS

    Sometimes, you may want to programmatically set a default user picture (with the option for the user to change it later to a picture of her own choice). You used to be able to delete the JPEGPhoto attribute and just add in a Picture attribute, but that seems to have broken somewhere between October 2018…

  • TCC in Mojave doesn’t prevent deleting local folders for AD-bound Macs

    Note: We’re currently using a setup of Force local home directory on startup disk for AD-bound Macs instead of Create mobile account at login or Use UNC path from Active Directory to derive network home location—so if you’re using either of those other options, your mileage may vary—definitely do some testing! This is also as…

  • Google Forms preview gives “resource unavailable” error message

    We had a situation in which someone created a Google Form and the preview for it would always come up with a resource unavailable error. This wouldn’t happen for any other form. And it wouldn’t happen on another computer. Clearing the cache didn’t fix it, but clearing just Google cookies did fix it. Something definitely…