Tag: macos
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Upgrading to High Sierra: “You may not install this volume because the computer is missing a firmware partition”
If you try to upgrade to High Sierra (macOS 10.13) and get You may not install this volume because the computer is missing a firmware partition when trying to select your drive to upgrade, it may be because you’re upgrading on an OWC drive. If you’re using Munki, the error may appear in your /Library/Managed…
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Parental Controls keeps blocking allowed apps
If macOS Parental Controls keep blocking allowed apps (both allowed through the checklist in System Preferences and through manually approving via password), deleting the account and recreating it may not be enough to fix the glitch. Instead, try recreating an account with a new name. I’ve found Santa to block things more reliably (or not…
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CrashPlan 6.5 stuck on Connecting… and never times out
We had a couple of clients who would just never do an initial connection to CrashPlan after the upgrade from CrashPlan 4 to CrashPlan 6.5. But they would never time out or give an error message either. Restarting the CrashPlan service didn’t help. Restarting the computer didn’t help. Uninstalling and reinstalling the client didn’t help.…
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When DEP nag won’t work but Setup Assistant will to enroll in your MDM
Explanation Symptoms Workaround Automating Other Considerations Explanation The two-days-later update: after doing troubleshooting with our MDM, asking around to other Mac admins, Google searching, and creating an enterprise case with Apple, I finally got back a definitive answer from Apple, which is that this functionality is essentially broken in Sierra (10.12.6). They’re saying it should…
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macOS client can’t download Apple updates
This is a really odd situation. I have one client machine that cannot download a particular Apple update. This is the error message that comes up: softwareupdate -d -a Software Update Tool Finding available software Error downloading Security Update 2017-002: The Internet connection appears to be offline. Done. Error downloading updates. Here are two things…
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askForPassword and askForPasswordDelay in macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)
Update: Apparently 10.13.4 just breaks this completely (defaults write commands won’t do anything any more). Thanks to tristan on the MacAdmins Slack for pointing this out. In macOS 10.12 (Sierra) and earlier, you could go to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General > Require password ________ after sleep or screen saver begins, and…
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Validate a FileVault recovery key using a .plist file
If you want to validate your FileVault recovery key from the terminal, you can do sudo fdesetup validaterecovery and then be prompted for the recovery key. But what if you want to use a .plist to validate the recovery key instead of getting prompted for the key? This is where it’s a bit counterintuitive. When…
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Troubleshooting faded-looking icons in Managed Software Center on 10.13 clients
Update: Apparently, a real fix for this is on the way. Acknowledgements: thanks to elios and bochoven on MacAdmins Slack for figuring out what was going on. If the icons in your Munki repo looked fine on your 10.12 and 10.11 clients, and then a few of them suddenly look sort of faded (for example,…
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macOS command to add back Wi-Fi service
Acknowledgements: Hat tip to Eric Hemmeter on the MacAdmins Slack for this command. If you want a command that will add back the Wi-Fi service if you deleted it and now want it back, here it is: networksetup -createnetworkservice Wi-Fi en1 That’s assuming the output of networksetup -listallhardwareports has a hardware port of Wi-Fi with…
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Terminal command to see the Startup Disk in macOS
If you want to see what the current Startup Disk is on your macOS installation, you can certainly go to System Preferences > Startup Disk. But if you want to use the terminal instead of the GUI, this command will return the current Startup Disk: bless –getBoot If a Startup Disk is set, you’ll see…
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Use the command-line to set a firmware password on macOS
For extra security, you can add a firmware password to Macs, especially since Find My Mac is essentially useless (unlike for iPads, which have an activation lock preventing thieves from reactivating the iPad after a factory reset) and DEP-to-MDM enrollments for Macs can even be avoided by thieves if they’re resourceful enough. If you have…
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If you can’t change the system language on macOS…
In theory, you can change the system language through System Preferences on macOS. I did find a couple of machines that came with the system language in a different one from what I wanted, and even when I changed the primary language back to English (and rebooted when prompted), the original language persisted. After doing…
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Updating MS Office dock icons from 2011 to 2016 using dockutil
Managing client machines while also giving your users freedom to customize their machines as they want can be a bit tricky. On the one hand, you want to automate things as much as possible so users don’t have to be bothered with too many update prompts and other maintenance nuisances. On the other hand, you…
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Can’t change Safari homepage in Sierra, even with no profiles managing homepage
So I came across something weird that’s affected only my 10.12.4 clients (none of my 10.11.6 clients seem to be affected by this). Even though I have only one Safari profile enabled, which is set-once and doesn’t manage the homepage, my 10.12.4 clients are unable to change the homepage in Safari manually. Whatever the homepage…
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Using startosinstall to install a macOS upgrade with Munki
Update: The instructions below will be obsolete once Munki 3 is released. More details on the Munki 3 implementation can be found on the Munki wiki. createOSXinstallPkg is a great project for making an Apple macOS installer into a .pkg you can deploy with Munki. Apple did some things to break that process for 10.12.4.…