Alan Siu's Blog

Tag: mac

  • 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

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • WinClone Pro freezing up

    We had an older version of WinClone. Installed a newer version. The newer version froze up… or it let you click on the left part of the window, but then you couldn’t click on the right part of the window. Turns out, even though it looks as if you can have two versions of WinClone…

  • AutoPkg Adobe Flash Player recipes, licenses, and Munki

    13 October, 2016 update: Adobe just broke this by making the distribution page require an Adobe ID login before you can view it. Even though Flash is slowly being deprecated, people still use it. And while people still use it, Mac admins keep having to make sure their users’ Adobe Flash Player plugins are up…

  • “Out of memory” error with Adobe InDesign CS6 and El Capitan

    A user who upgraded to El Capitan but still uses Adobe InDesign CS6 was getting an error about InDesign being “out of memory.” I did some Googling and came across this fix. Application Frame was already disabled under the window, so the user didn’t have to do that, but “trashing” (really renaming to com.adobe.InDesign.plist.bak when…

  • Requiring a user to be logged in to install a Munki item

    You may occasionally get an item you want installed for clients, but the item is oddly constructed so as to require a user to be logged in. (Relevant Munki-Discuss mailing list thread) Even though there are supported pkginfo keys in Munki to require a logout or require a reboot, there is no official way to…

  • Terminal command to get the full name of a Mac user

    Munki-Enroll is a great little script combo that automatically changes the ClientIdentifier for Munki clients and then automatically creates a corresponding manifest on the Munki server that includes the old manifest. I wanted to tweak it quite a bit to fit some of the quirks of how our organization does Munki client manifests, so I…

  • How to create a bootable Ubuntu USB stick on/for Macs

    For some reason (at least as of this writing), the official Ubuntu documentation on creating a bootable USB of Ubuntu for Macs is now recommending using UNetbootin. I haven’t found that to actually work. I dug up a cached copy of the old instructions (which do work), but I wanted to document the old procedure…