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Some basics of DEPNotify and a sample script
If you’ve been doing Munki admin’ing for a short while, you’ve probably heard people talk about DEPNotify, whose README says is “a small light weight notification app that was designed to let your users know what’s going on during a DEP enrollment.” Aforementioned DEPNotify README is fairly comprehensive in terms of going over all the […]
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If your VMWare guest macOS loses network connectivity
If you haven’t changed any settings, and suddenly the Internet connection on your VMWare guest macOS installation goes out, and shutting down the VM or rebooting the VM doesn’t help, try rebooting the host Mac. That will likely fix the problem (not sure why that problem comes up in the first place.
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Using a full macOS installer with Munki to patch macOS
Note about Silicon Macs This will not work with Apple Silicon Macs, as Apple now requires you to enter the password of a secure token user account in order to run startosinstall. Shoutout Shoutout to Rod Christiansen on the MacAdmins Slack for putting this strange (but still working for now) method of patching on my […]
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Force-stopping the MunkiStatus progress bar at the login window
Sometimes, the MunkiStatus progress bar over the login window can get stuck, and pressing the Stop button can take a while to halt the progress bar completely. To kill it immediately, press Cmd-Option-Shift-Escape (this is a slight modification of the usual force-quite key combination, which is Cmd-Option-Escape). Full credit to Yehuda Bialik and Greg Neagle […]
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Using AppleScript to install macOS software updates via System Preferences
Right now, this is a bit more of a proof-of-concept, but since /usr/sbin/softwareupdate has become increasingly unreliable in the past year for automating and enforcing Apple software updates, having a way to automate installing updates through the GUI on certain relatively unattended Macs is worth exploring. I’ve created a GitHub project for that called Sys […]
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Fixing Jamf device signature error
Even though this Jamf Nation thread is five years old, as of this writing, it’s still got the solution to the Device Signature Error – A valid device signature is required to perform the action error message. In my experience, the actual working solution is to run sudo jamf enroll -prompt and then enter credentials […]
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Running commands as a user when scripting for Munki or Jamf
Munki and Jamf run as root, so scripts they execute execute as root, not user. One great way around this is to use Outset‘s login scripts (login-once, login-every), but sometimes you may have occasion to actually run a script immediately as the logged-in user. Obviously, you’ll want to get the currently logged-in user into a […]
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Introduction to Nudge
What is Nudge? In 2018, Erik Gomez created Nudge, which is open source and has nine other contributors as of this writing. Part of the beauty of Nudge is its simplicity—it doesn’t actually install any updates itself (it does invoke the softwareupdate binary to check for or download Apple software updates, but it doesn’t actually […]
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Forcing updates to Google Chrome using Chrome preferences / a Chrome profile
Why use Chrome relaunch notification instead of Munki I’m a huge fan of using Munki to patch software on macOS, but Munki is generally polite—it usually won’t kill an application while the user is using it. There is an option in Munki to force an install after a certain date, but that will log the […]