Alan Siu's Blog

Tag: santa

  • Force-hiding the Santa menu bar item

    Starting with Santa 2026.1, North Pole Security now includes a menu bar item for Santa: That can be helpful for seeing easily what version of Santa you have installed or to do a sync without having to type sudo santactl sync. But you may, as administrators in IT and Security, not want to have the…

  • Considerations when migrating from Google Santa to North Pole Santa

    Mountain View to North Pole As of February, 2025, the Google version of Santa has been retired, but there’s a new North Pole version of Santa available. While the migration guide outlines a fairly straightforward process, there are some nuances to consider. Even though I highly recommend reading the actual migration guide, the tl;dr version…

  • Unloading Santa’s system extension when uninstalling using Munki

    What the problem is System extensions in place of kernel extensions For macOS 10.15+, Apple has deprecated kernel extensions in favor of system extensions, but system extensions can’t be unloaded silently by script. If you try to unload Santa’s system extension using the command: systemextensionsctl uninstall EQHXZ8M8AV com.google.santa.daemon you’ll get this: At this time, this…

  • Using Santa to block macOS upgrades

    In the past, I’d used a fake installer approach to stop users from upgrading to the newest macOS version. But with macOS 10.14 (Mojave), I started blocking using Santa (see Using Santa to block an .app for more details on general Santa use). It’s likely this Santa-blocking approach also works for High Sierra and Sierra…

  • 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…

  • BlacklistRegex and WhitelistRegex on Santa

    Acknowledgements Thanks once again to @bur on the Mac Admins Slack for the info I’m documenting here. BlacklistRegex and WhitelistRegex In a previous blog entry, I talked about using Santa to block apps by certificate (and I briefly mentioned blocking by binary). You can also block by path using regular expressions. Binary takes precedence over…

  • Using Santa to block an .app

    Acknowledgements Special shoutout to @bur on the Mac Admins Slack for help with some command-line syntax. Santa can be complicated, but doesn’t need to be Google has a project on GitHub called Santa, which is quite powerful and complicated. As the project’s readme says, though: Documentation: This is currently limited.. I just wanted to do…