Category: Mac admin’ing
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Running daily, weekly, and monthly scripts in macOS using periodic
Background I was looking for time-based project similar to Outset (which runs boot and login scripts stored in various directories), and apparently there’s one already baked into macOS that will run daily, weekly, and monthly scripts. Shoutout to @elios on the MacAdmins Slack for letting me know about periodic Launch Daemons If you run sudo…
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The limits of password-protecting a .mobileconfig profile
Three years ago, Rich Trouton wrote Adding password protection to manually installed management profiles, which gives step-by-step instructions for how to make a manually-installed profile prompt for a custom password (in addition to the local admin password) when being removed. I’ve tested this on Catalina, and it still works! That said, it worked only from…
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Double-checking details of deployed PPPC/TCC profile from MDM
If you’ve deployed a PPPC/TCC profile from your user-approved MDM to a Mac, and you see the profile in System Preferences > Profiles, you can also verify all the details of the deployed profile on the Mac itself by going to /Library/Application Support/com.apple.TCC/MDMOverrides.plist (which is an SIP-protected directory, by the way).
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Things to keep in mind if using a profile to delay macOS updates
Now that Apple has removed the –ignore flag from softwareupdate, it’s recommending you use the forceDelayedSoftwareUpdates and enforcedSoftwareUpdateDelay flags (more details in Device Management Profile: Restrictions), which are supposed to, in theory, delay an updates user visibility a certain number of days after the update’s release. The number of days delayed may not be precise…
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How to deploy a .pkg via Munki if a config file has to be in the same directory
Vendors package software in funny ways sometimes. Every now and then, you might come across a vendor .pkg that comes with some kind of .xml or .cfg or .txt that has to be in the same directory as the .pkg. It’s likely because there’s some postinstall script in the .pkg itself that references that text…
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Some basics of DEPNotify and a sample script
If you’ve been doing Munki admin’ing for a short while, you’ve probably heard people talk about DEPNotify, whose README says is “a small light weight notification app that was designed to let your users know what’s going on during a DEP enrollment.” Aforementioned DEPNotify README is fairly comprehensive in terms of going over all the…
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Fixing DEPNotify GUI not launching with keyPath error
I’m not sure how my computer got into this funky state, but I was playing around with a DEPNotify script, and after a while, I was suddenly getting these errors every time I tried to run it: DEPNotify[12422:409983] Failed to set (keyPath) user defined inspected property on (DEPNotify.WindowController): [ setValue:forUndefinedKey:]: this class is not key…
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Python script to list software available in a Munki repo
I created a small project (for fun) to list out software available in a Munki repo. It’s called MunkiItemsList. On a basic level, it looks for all the items that are listed in any optional installs manifest, and then lists out the display name, description, and highest version available. There are some additional options described…
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Python 3 script to add optional installs to the SelfServeManifest
Two years ago, I wrote a bash script that adds a bunch of optional installs to the SelfServeManifest using /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy, which is a fine tool, but it can get bit messy sometimes. I did play around with using /usr/local/munki/manifestutil, but it got a bit convoluted, and I figured “Hey, why not just write it in…
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If your VMWare guest macOS loses network connectivity
If you haven’t changed any settings, and suddenly the Internet connection on your VMWare guest macOS installation goes out, and shutting down the VM or rebooting the VM doesn’t help, try rebooting the host Mac. That will likely fix the problem (not sure why that problem comes up in the first place.
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Script to make Jamf Self Service policy install a Munki optional install
There is a huge project called jamJAR that seeks to integrate Munki and Jamf in a seamless way. I’ve written a script that does something a bit less ambitious, but it may still be helpful to your organization if you are “using” Jamf Self-Service, really want to be using Managed Software Center, and still want…
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Using a full macOS installer with Munki to patch macOS
Note about Silicon Macs This will not work with Apple Silicon Macs, as Apple now requires you to enter the password of a secure token user account in order to run startosinstall. Shoutout Shoutout to Rod Christiansen on the MacAdmins Slack for putting this strange (but still working for now) method of patching on my…
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AutoPkg failed: hdiutil: attach failed – no mountable file systems error
If, when running AutoPkg, you get an error like failed: hdiutil: attach failed – no mountable file systems but you’re able to mount the .dmg manually (i.e., it’s not a corrupted download), double-check you don’t have a restrictions profile installed that requires you to authenticate when mounting disk images. That setting is pretty much useless…
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T2 Macs don’t count as external boot media
I don’t see this documented anywhere in an officially explicit way, so I’m writing a blog post on this. With the introduction of T2-chip Macs, Apple introduced something called Startup Security Utility, and the official line there is that you can change the setting to “Allow booting from external media,” and then you can boot…
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If you update an AutoPkg parent recipe, but your override is still using old settings…
AutoPkg has a cool feature called parent trust that allows you to create recipe overrides that store a hash of the parent recipe (instead of running the parent recipe directly), and then prevent you from running the recipe if there’s a change to the parent recipe, until you update the trust info. (I also have…