Posted on January 5, 2022 by alanysiu
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 unchanged if you sign out of that account and sign into a different account. It literally is the email used to activate Office. Once Office is activated, that email will still be the same email that originally activated Office. A more reliable (if less human-readable)
Posted on December 15, 2021 by alanysiu
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 options for the user experience. You can allow or disallow user deferrals of Nudge. You can set the maximum number of allowed deferrals. You can have a random delay of up to a certain number of seconds before the Nudge window appears. But what is
Posted on November 22, 2021 by alanysiu
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). I am not a VM expert. I cannot support this tutorial. I’m sharing only a more detailed step-by-step guide of a summary I read, and this is only what worked for me. If it doesn’t work for you, I probably don’t know any better than
Posted on November 16, 2021 by alanysiu
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), and users are still often resorting to using Rosetta 2 to run Intel applications on Silicon Macs. If you want to do a quick inventory on which applications you have installed are Intel only, Silicon only, or universal, you can go to Apple symbol >
Posted on November 8, 2021 by alanysiu
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 going forward, and the re-signed profile won’t show you what’s actually being enforced. You can—if you know what keys to use for what domains—create an “upload” profile with XML. You can also use a .json schema that creates the XML for you. Just be careful
Posted on October 20, 2021 by alanysiu
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 Applications > Utilities > Terminal. It will look like this when in progress: softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer Scanning for installer Installing: 19.0% Once the download is complete, it will stop with the “installing” percentage: softwareupdate --fetch-full-installer Scanning for installer Install finished successfully Don’t be alarmed by the
Posted on October 14, 2021 by alanysiu
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 pop to the top. Maybe it’s commonly requested software, or it could be an on-demand script that users run periodically (as opposed to something like Chrome, which users would install once, and then not have to install again). You could make it the only featured
Posted on October 8, 2021 by alanysiu
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 behind on updates, but what if you just want to quickly test it on a machine that’s already patched? Existing command-line options and their limitations for customized text testing If you run the regular command-line arguments, you can either see your custom image (not customized
Posted on September 15, 2021 by alanysiu
This isn’t a comprehensive “if you get this, these are all the solutions” post. This is more of a “this worked for me, and it may work for you, too” post. If you’re using sudo profiles renew -type enrollment to enroll a Mac in your MDM via DEP (or “automated device enrollment”), you may get this error message: Enrollment with management server failed. The MDM server for your organization returned an unexpected status (500). One potential solution to this is to go to Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager, unassign the Mac from the MDM, reassign the Mac to
Posted on August 25, 2021 by alanysiu
Typically, to find out of if a user account on a Mac has a secure token, you run a command like sysadminctl -secureTokenStatus username Where username is the username of the account you’re checking for a secure token. Several folks on the MacAdmins Slack have mentioned that the most accurate way to get the secure token users is to use diskutil Example: diskutil apfs listCryptoUsers / Cryptographic users for disk1s5s1 (2 found) | +-- EBC6M064-0000-22FA-AX34-00307543DCAC | Type: Personal Recovery User | +-- EA93MFB0-AA30-123B-99E8-80B8C109F1E7 Type: Local Open Directory User dscl . -search /Users GeneratedUID EA93MFB0-AA30-123B-99E8-80B8C109F1E7 nameofauseraccount GeneratedUID = ( "EA93MFB0-AA30-123B-99E8-80B8C109F1E7" ) Incidentally, even though people usually use listCryptoUsers, there are several other parameters that return the exact same result. From man diskutil: listCryptoUsers | listUsers | listCryptoKeys