Alan Siu's Blog

Tag: mac

  • Manually adding icons to Munki-imported packages

    As with all Munki tutorials, this one assumes you already know some Munki basics. If you don’t, you might want to start with Absolute beginner’s guide to setting up Munki (not monkey). When you use munkiimport to import software packages, it will either find icons automatically or prompt you to try to extract icons from…

  • Creating an installation package for a scheduled Adobe Remote Update Manager

    This is kind of a dual-purpose Mac tutorial—how to automate Adobe Remote Update Manager and how to create an installation package using a point-and-click graphical interface. Automating Adobe Remote Update Manager You can find the Adobe Remote Update Manager on Adobe’s Creative Suite Enterprise Deployment page. Just scroll down a bit until you find it.…

  • Installing MunkiReport

    What is MunkiReport MunkiReport is a web-based reporting interface for Munki clients. It’s cool to deploy a bunch of Munki clients, but it’d be nice to know how many are out there, and any errors or pending installs there may be on those clients. If you haven’t set up your Munki server yet, do that…

  • Mounting an external drive when users are logged out in Mac OS X

    Problem? In older versions of Mac OS X, you could create a special .plist file that auto-mounts disks even when a user isn’t logged in. You can see that (no longer working) procedure here. I don’t know exactly when support for that ended, but some people have suggested around Mountain Lion. (If you try it…

  • Getting started with pygame on a Mac

    There are a lot of pygame tutorials out there, but I haven’t yet found a simple, step-by-step how-to on how to just get pygame installed on a Mac, and then actually use it. So, hopefully, this will work for you. This example was done using Macs running OS X 10.10 (Yosemite). Your mileage may vary.…

  • Movie projects disappear after iMovie upgrade

    When you upgrade to the new iMovie, there’s a quick prompt to update your old iMovie projects, but if you dismissed that and don’t know how to go back and update again… Go to File > Update Projects and Events… More info at Apple: Update projects and events from previous versions of iMovie in iMovie…

  • Fix for disk erase failed couldn’t unmount disk

    If you’re trying on a Mac using Disk Utility to erase a hard drive and it won’t unmount, giving you an error similar to Disk erase failed. Couldn’t unmount disk, then you may have to force an unmount through the terminal. Launch up Terminal.app (through /Applications/Utilities or through a Spotlight search). Then paste in the…

  • Running sudo commands in Automator

    If you’re wondering how to run sudo (for privilege escalation) commands in Automator, this is one way to do it. Launch up Automator (of course). Find Run AppleScript in the library of actions. Then, drag it over to the workflow area on the right. By default, Automator will put in some script structure for you…

  • Fix ownership of copied folders for Active Directory Macs

    Warning This script does some serious system modifications. If you don’t know what you’re doing, ask questions in the comments. Don’t just run this script if you don’t understand what it does or how it’s doing it. This also assumes short usernames match up with user folder names, which they usually do. What issue this…

  • How to find the IP address of a printer on a Mac

    If you have a printer already installed on your Mac, but you just want to find the IP address, this is one quick way to do it without printing out a test page and wasting paper / ink. Click on the Apple logo and then select About This Mac. Click on System Report…. In the…

  • Authentication failed on changing admin accounts for ARD machine

    I encountered an odd thing. I had ARD set to remote into a few workstations. I was doing some account cleanup on them and changed the admin accounts. In System Preferences Sharing, I still had it that all admins could remote in, but after deleting an admin account and adding a new one, I couldn’t…

  • /System/Library/Keychains empty… and repercussions

    The issue We ran into a weird situation once, in which a user could not update anything. Trying to update Adobe Flash ended in an immediate error (Application Initialization Error), launching the Mac App Store led to the App Store saying it couldn’t be contacted, and Chrome saying it was updated when it was several…

  • Getting Started with Munki (not monkey)

    5 April, 2018 update: This page used to have a tutorial that walked you through setting up a bunch of GUI tools to manage and keep up-to-date a Munki server. I’ve reconsidered, and I don’t think that’s the best approach for new Munki administrators to take to learning Munki. First Steps Here are a series…

  • Deleting Mac Keychains in an Active Directory Environment

    Update: The easiest way to do this is actually to install Offset and then put a RemoveLastUserKeychains script into /usr/local/offset/logout-every (make sure it’s owned by root:wheel and has 755 permissions). What’s the problem? If you’re in a primarily or exclusively Mac environment, but you’re managing logins through Active Directory, password changes on the AD level…