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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Enrolling with management server failed with 500 status
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…
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Using diskutil to find secure token users on a Mac
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…
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Troubleshooting “zsh: operation not permitted”
If you try to run a script from the Terminal in macOS, you may get an error that says zsh: operation not permitted. As of this writing, the top Google search results for that all point to needing to grant the Terminal full disk access (either via System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy…
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WWDC 2021 announcements for Mac admins…
This fall, Apple is going to release its newest OS: macOS 12, Monterey. With that, there are some major improvements to Mac management that were not in Big Sur. Here are some highlights… From What’s new in managing Apple devices System Extensions removal With Big Sur, there were some fairly complicated digital gymnastics you had…
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Command to add a secure token to a macOS user account
If you run sysadminctl -secureTokenStatus firstuseraccount and see a secure token is enabled for that first account but run sysadminctl -secureTokenStatus seconduseraccount and see a secure token is not enabled for that second account, you can try adding a secure token to the second account, so it can turn on FileVault or become a FileVault-enabled…
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“Invalid Message – The message could not be parsed.” with Jamf Cloud
Invalid Message – The message could not be parsed. is an odd error message for a jamf recon when you’re using Jamf Cloud, because if you Google that error message, there are only two results: FYI – Invalid Message – The message could not be parsed. Devices not updating inventory (Invalid Message – The message…
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Why don’t Mac admins use MDM for Apple software updates?
Context People who administer Mac deployments at a large-ish scale (hundreds to tens of thousands—i.e., large enough that you have to automate things and can’t physically touch every machine to change settings or install updates) generally want to be able to patch software and macOS while giving a decent user experience. I think you’ll find…
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Making sharding work with Munki catalogs in mind
Some Munki admins use sharding to roll out to various portions of their fleet. Most versions of sharding create a random-looking (but not actually random) integer either between 0 and 99 or 1 and 100 that is based on a hash of the Mac’s serial number. Where that can be tricky is when you want…
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Copying the Rosetta 2 installer for offline installations
I honestly don’t know why this gets asked about as often as it does, but I’ve seen several instances in which Mac admins want to know how to get the Rosetta 2 installer .pkg to be installed offline. The installer is about 6.2 MB, so I don’t think bandwidth is the issue, but maybe it…
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Chrome mid-update versions and Munki
Most of the time, if you want to patch Chrome using Munki, you just use add Chrome as a managed update or managed install to the relevant manifests in your Munki repo, and then have the AutoPkg Chrome.munki recipe import the new version of Chrome into your Munki repo from time to time (daily, weekly,…
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Using a nopkg to “nudge” in Munki for Silicon Macs
Context This is really just a proof-of-concept, but as of this writing both Nudge and Munki use the softwareupdate binary to try to download updates to see what’s available. With the Silicon chip Macs, Apple has now made it so that softwareupdate will prompt you for a password for downloading pending updates, even if you’re…