Alan Siu's Blog

  • Managed Software Center may get stuck on “Starting Adobe installer…”

    If you import an Adobe installer into your Munki repo, you may get it stuck on the installation part where Managed Software Center (or Munki’s logs) will just say Starting Adobe installer… and get stuck on that perpetually (I waited “only” a half hour, but it could possibly stay indefinitely). I searched in the MacAdmins…

  • Modifying a distribution .pkg that has max macOS version requirements

    What’s the problem? A vendor has the option, when creating a macOS distribution package, to put in a minimum and/or maximum macOS version. That can make things slightly annoying if you’re trying, for example, to test out the current vendor package on a beta macOS version (or even a fully released macOS version that the…

  • Deploying default Chrome settings to Macs

    You can, of course, manage certain Chrome settings via Google Workspace Admin, but what if you don’t want to manage things like the homepage, but you just want to set defaults for new deployments, and you still want users to be able to change those settings later? Google has something called an Initial Preferences file…

  • “looks like a filename, but the file does not exist” error when deploying a Cloud Function

    Caveat This fits in the category of “What it ended up being for me, and it may help someone else” and not “I’m an expert on all gcloud errors, and this is always the solution,” so please resist the urge to comment with “This didn’t solve it for me. What’s the solution to my problem?”…

  • Making a custom Nudge launch agent

    Introduction Nudge releases generally come as Nudge, Nudge logger, and the Nudge launch agent. As of this writing, the Nudge launch agent will launch up Nudge every 30 minutes. The package is also signed: If you’re creating your own launch agent, you may want to code-sign it, or you may not have to, depending on…

  • Ensure your VMware Fusion Macs enroll in Jamf as Computers, not Devices

    It used to be that you could create a VMware Fusion virtual machine Mac, enroll it in Jamf (either by spoofing the serial number for Automated Device Enrollment or just using an auto-generated VM serial for manual enrollment). Recently (not sure when, exactly), you may have noticed if you try to enroll a VMware Fusion…

  • Using Nudge’s targetedOSVersionsRule

    With a single .json file or a single MDM-delivered configuration profile, you can have various deadlines and desired OS versions for Nudge, depending on the current macOS version of the client. Let’s say, for example, you want an earlier deadline for client machines on a very old build but a later deadline for other client…

  • Finding out which organization Office 365 is activated with

    If you want to see what organization Office 365 is activated with, you can take a peek at the user preferences: defaults read com.microsoft.office This is a bit tricky, though. At first glance, it might seem defaults read com.microsoft.office OfficeActivationEmailAddress is the best indicator of what account is signed in, but that value will remain…

  • Basic default behavior in Nudge (Swift, not Python)

    A couple of years ago, I published an Introduction to Nudge. At the time, Nudge was written in Python and worked in Catalina. The new version of Nudge is written in Swift and works for Big Sur and Monterey (and presumably Alcatraz and beyond). This new version of Nudge has a whole bunch of configurable…

  • How to install macOS 12 (Monterey) as a VMware Fusion guest VM

    Notes These are just more fleshed out steps from a brief overview in the VMware Fusion communities online forums. Hopefully, these instructions will be obsolete soon in a future update of VMware Fusion (where you can just select macOS 12, drag the installer to the install wizard, and have VMware Fusion do everything for you).…

  • Script to find application architectures on your Mac

    Apple has once again switched architectures. It used to be a switch from PowerPC to Intel. Now it is a switch from Intel to Apple Silicon. Vendors are in the process of switching from releasing Intel only or separate Intel and Silicon binaries to releasing universal binaries (that will work on both Intel and Silicon),…

  • Signs you may have conflicting MDM profiles in macOS

    Jamf doesn’t currently let you easily separate out individual parts of a profile, so if you deploy a Restrictions profile, you have to enforce all the parts of the Restrictions profile. Sure, you can download the profile, un-sign it, modify it, re-sign it, and then re-upload it, but that’s not very easy to then modify…

  • Installing macOS in VMware Fusion

    Introduction It’s not that difficult to install a macOS guest VM on a macOS host using VMware Fusion and personal (non-enterprise) licenses for VMware Fusion are now cost-free. But here are the actual steps. Get the installer Method 1 There’s a way built into macOS to get the installer using the softwareupdate –fetch-full-installer command in…

  • Popping a Munki optional install to the top of Managed Software Center

    Most of the time, having optional installs in Managed Software Center be in alphabetical order is fine. Users can scroll through the list or search for optional installs by name. But if you have a long list of optional installs, you may want one or two items that are at the end of the alphabet…

  • Doing quick tests of customized (Swift) Nudge text

    Introduction The new Swift version of Nudge is available now, and it provides a lot more customization options (and the ability to use either a .json or a configuration profile to set preferences), including lots of customized text. You can, of course, test out your customized test by deploying Nudge to a test machine that’s…