Alan Siu's Blog

Category: Uncategorized

  • Setting the date/time in macOS (10.14+) recovery mode

    Back in ye olde days, you used to be able to run ntpdate -u time.apple.com to update the date/time automatically in recovery mode, but Apple removed ntpdate in Mojave. In regular bootup, you can run sntp -sS time-a.nist.gov and may get an error like kod_init_kod_db(): Cannot open KoD db file /var/db/ntp-kod: No such file or…

  • 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…

  • Changing the boot order on a VM in vSphere

    If you want to change the boot order on a virtual machine in vSphere, it’s not a setting in the vSphere interface. You have to force it to bring up the BIOS menu, and then change the order in the BIOS once you’ve booted up the VM. Go to Edit Settings > Options > Advanced…

  • Let’s Encrypt certificate “expired” even though it’s not?

    One of our servers (Ubuntu 18.04 with Nginx) is using Let’s Encrypt‘s certbot to renew its SSL certificate regularly via script. Recently, it reported in web browsers as having an expired certificate. When I ran certbot renew it showed as having the certificate set to expire months from now. Just on a lark, I rebooted…

  • Using GAM to delete erroneously sent emails

    Sometimes someone sends an email and wants to unsend it. It doesn’t happen very often, and usually there isn’t much you can do about if the email has been sent to an external recipient. If your organization uses G-Suite, though, you can delete internally sent emails. Just be careful. And also know that it’s still…

  • Dealing with iCloud accounts on DEP-enrolled iOS devices

    I’m not sure how many other schools deal with this, but we found out something rather curious the other day, and it’s been confirmed by Mosyle (our MDM) and a couple of folks on the MacAdmins Slack. My understanding was that a DEP-enrolled MDM’ed iOS device would not allow an iCloud account (regular Apple ID,…

  • Referencing a PHP variable by using another variable as part of the name

    This is kind of a niche scenario, but when you Google making a variable from another variable php, most of the examples involve using a double dollar sign, which may not be what you want to do. Yes, whenever possible, it makes sense to use arrays instead of weirdly-constructed variable names, but that may depend…

  • Word 2016 in Windows printing embedded images zoomed in and cropped

    One Windows user ran into an issue in which embedded images in a Word document would appear fine in the print preview but then would print zoomed in and cropped. In other words, the area on the printed document where the image should be is the same size as the image should be but only…

  • iPhone cookie error when adding a Google account

    If you are on iOS 12.0.1 and getting a you’ve reached this page because we have detected that cookies are disabled in your browser error message every time you try to add a Google account to Mail—and you’re certain that cookies in Safari are indeed not blocked—update iOS (to 12.1, as of this writing), and…

  • Getting osTicket to schedule ticket creation from emails

    If you go to Admin Panel > Emails > Settings > Incoming Emails, right now (as of release 1.10.4—the latest stable release as of this writing), you’ll see something called Fetch on auto-cron, which isn’t super useful, because it will fetch emails only if an agent is logged into osTicket. There is an external scheduler…

  • MathType formulas shrink after editing and saving them in Microsoft Word

    March 2019 Update: WIRIS has now announced a workaround for randomly resized equations. I don’t know for sure that that’s exactly the same problem as the shrinking formulas, but it could be. Definitely worth checking out if you’re experiencing this issue. One teacher had an issue in MathType that involved saved formulas in a Word…

  • Using Santa to block macOS upgrades

    In the past, I’d used the fake installer approach to stop users from upgrading to the newest macOS version. But with macOS 10.14 (Mojave), I started blocking using Santa (see Using Santa to block an .app for more details on general Santa use). It’s likely this Santa-blocking approach also works for High Sierra and Sierra…

  • Activating Geometer’s Sketchpad in macOS 10.13.6 (and beyond?)

    In Licensing GSP Deployments by Terminal Command , I covered the officially sanctioned way to license GSP5 for Macs. I believe that was still working even as of 10.13.5. It certainly was working in 10.12. Unfortunately, with 10.13.6—unless you had an already activated GSP when you upgraded to 10.13.6 from 10.13.5 or earlier—you might get…