Alan Siu's Blog

Category: Uncategorized

  • Unlock the Printers preference pane for non-admin users on Mac OS X

    Took me a while to track down how to do this. Found the solution at JAMF Nation: Allow Security Preference Pane non admin

  • Setting up SSMTP on Ubuntu with Gmail

    The procedure for setting up SSMTP on Ubuntu is fairly well documented on the Ubuntu wiki, but the only amendment I’d make would be to change the hostname to localhost. On Ubuntu wiki but fails to send emails: hostname=MyEmailAddress@gmail.com Amendment that works: hostname=localhost

  • Setting up Nagios on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial)

    The best guide I found for installing Nagios on Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) was How To Install Nagios on Ubuntu 16.04, with only a couple of amendments. First of all, it’s not using the absolute latest version of Nagios or the Nagios plugins. And secondly, it’s missing a command in terms of untarring the downloaded Nagios.…

  • Not bothering teachers with Managed Software Center notifications during the school day

    This is a sequel to Keeping up to date using Munki without bothering users, which discussed a few approaches to not bothering users with Managed Software Center updates. I’d tried controlling it with rescheduling the launch daemon, which works well for desktops, which are plugged in and can be scheduled to be on at specific…

  • Respondus LockDown Browser and ARDAgent

    Respondus LockDown Browser will complain (i.e., not launch) if ARDAgent is running, which can be a problem for lab computers. Fortunately, there is a way around this. Unfortunately, its implemented in a security-by-obscurity way instead of an actual secure way, so I can’t really explain all the steps here (obscurity is all we have—there’s no…

  • AutoPkg and Munki with UnRarX

    AutoPkg and Munki are a great combination to keep client machines updated with the latest versions of software. UnRarX (at least as of this writing) has kind of a funky situation with AutoPkg, though. The AutoPkg download recipe is currently downloading the beta of 2.2 instead of the final release of 2.2. What makes this…

  • iCloud sync creating duplicate files when saving

    This is kind of a bizarre scenario, but I thought I’d document it, in case anyone else runs into a similar issue, since I wasn’t able to find it through a Google search. One of our users ran into an issue with saving a file and then suddenly (or shortly afterward) having the same file…

  • If a /dev/diskX can’t be force unmounted…

    As a sequel to Fix for disk erase failed couldn’t unmount disk, if you really cannot even force unmount a disk, chances are it’s being used by some process. I found this tip helpful to locate the process (and then kill it). You may want to give it a try if you can’t force unmount…

  • MathType, Microsoft Office, and Munki

    Joshua D. Miller has a great walkthrough on how to deploy MathType using Munki. Just something to keep in mind—MathType works fine in El Capitan… just not with Microsoft Office 2016 (you will not be able to edit formulas, at least as of the writing of this blog post), so if you use MathType, stay…

  • Force removing Printer Generator printers

    Nick McSpadden has a wonderful project called Printer Generator that generates nopkg printer items for Munki. I have a fork of Nick’s project that has a few tweaks. Both of our projects really focus on seeing if a printer is installed with certain settings (name, location, IP address, make and model). But what if your…

  • Dell Monitor MacBook off center

    This isn’t the definite solution, but it’s just something to check for. We had a monitor that had its screen resolution off center… majorly off center (so much so that it could not be corrected fully via adjusting the horizontal position on the monitor settings). I’d read some stuff online about it being a VGA…

  • Troubleshooting “iTunes could not back up iPhone / iPad because an error occurred”

    If you get an unspecified error when backing up your iOS device, there are a myriad of potential solutions (anything from looking for phantom apps on your iPhone/iPad to ignoring a local computer backup and going for an iCloud backup instead). Apple also has an official guide for things to try. For the one user…

  • Importing Scratch 2 Offline Editor into Munki

    Munki is fairly good at recognizing things for import. If you have a .dmg with a .app inside, it will, by default, make it so the .app gets copied to the /Applications folder. If you have a .dmg with a .pkg, it will know to run the .pkg to install the item. If you have…

  • Changing the CrashPlan primary server by terminal commands on a Mac

    We recently wanted to change the primary server for our CrashPlan clients from an IP-based one to a DNS-based one. Unfortunately, CrashPlan doesn’t have a .plist file you can just run a defaults write command on. So apart from going into every machine and manually changing it from the menu bar, there is a way…

  • Disabling update checks for Adobe Flash Player

    If you’re using Munki (or some other management tool) to distribute Adobe Flash Player updates to your clients, you don’t need Flash Player itself to pester users with update prompts, so you can disable that by following Greg Neagle’s old tutorial on how to disable the notifications. It’s from 2011, but the same instructions apply…