Alan Siu's Blog

Tag: troubleshooting

  • AutoPkg failed: hdiutil: attach failed – no mountable file systems error

    If, when running AutoPkg, you get an error like failed: hdiutil: attach failed – no mountable file systems but you’re able to mount the .dmg manually (i.e., it’s not a corrupted download), double-check you don’t have a restrictions profile installed that requires you to authenticate when mounting disk images. That setting is pretty much useless…

  • If you update an AutoPkg parent recipe, but your override is still using old settings…

    AutoPkg has a cool feature called parent trust that allows you to create recipe overrides that store a hash of the parent recipe (instead of running the parent recipe directly), and then prevent you from running the recipe if there’s a change to the parent recipe, until you update the trust info. (I also have…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Fix for custom user icons freezing up System Preferences

    Even though there is some flexibility in terms of what sizes and resolutions you can use for custom user icons (to select for user pictures), if your icon’s resolution is way off, you may see a frozen blank, grey screen when trying to change the picture from that too-high-res picture to something else: To get…

  • Upping the logging level in Munki

    As noted in the Troubleshooting section of the Munki wiki, you can increase the logging level for Munki clients. The default logging level is 1, which looks like this: Dec 12 2019 20:04:20 -0800 GoogleChrome version 79.0.3945.79 (or newer) is already installed. If you increase the logging level to 4, it will look like this:…

  • Google Forms preview gives “resource unavailable” error message

    We had a situation in which someone created a Google Form and the preview for it would always come up with a resource unavailable error. This wouldn’t happen for any other form. And it wouldn’t happen on another computer. Clearing the cache didn’t fix it, but clearing just Google cookies did fix it. Something definitely…

  • Let’s Encrypt certificate “expired” even though it’s not?

    One of our servers (Ubuntu 18.04 with Nginx) is using Let’s Encrypt‘s certbot to renew its SSL certificate regularly via script. Recently, it reported in web browsers as having an expired certificate. When I ran certbot renew it showed as having the certificate set to expire months from now. Just on a lark, I rebooted…

  • Dealing with iCloud accounts on DEP-enrolled iOS devices

    I’m not sure how many other schools deal with this, but we found out something rather curious the other day, and it’s been confirmed by Mosyle (our MDM) and a couple of folks on the MacAdmins Slack. My understanding was that a DEP-enrolled MDM’ed iOS device would not allow an iCloud account (regular Apple ID,…

  • Word 2016 in Windows printing embedded images zoomed in and cropped

    One Windows user ran into an issue in which embedded images in a Word document would appear fine in the print preview but then would print zoomed in and cropped. In other words, the area on the printed document where the image should be is the same size as the image should be but only…

  • iPhone cookie error when adding a Google account

    If you are on iOS 12.0.1 and getting a you’ve reached this page because we have detected that cookies are disabled in your browser error message every time you try to add a Google account to Mail—and you’re certain that cookies in Safari are indeed not blocked—update iOS (to 12.1, as of this writing), and…

  • Getting osTicket to schedule ticket creation from emails

    If you go to Admin Panel > Emails > Settings > Incoming Emails, right now (as of release 1.10.4—the latest stable release as of this writing), you’ll see something called Fetch on auto-cron, which isn’t super useful, because it will fetch emails only if an agent is logged into osTicket. There is an external scheduler…

  • MathType formulas shrink after editing and saving them in Microsoft Word

    March 2019 Update: WIRIS has now announced a workaround for randomly resized equations. I don’t know for sure that that’s exactly the same problem as the shrinking formulas, but it could be. Definitely worth checking out if you’re experiencing this issue. One teacher had an issue in MathType that involved saved formulas in a Word…

  • What I learned upgrading from MunkiReport 2 to MunkiReport 3

    The setup for the old (version 2) MunkiReport was fairly simple. You essentially just downloaded the folder to your web server. The setup for the new (version 3) MunkiReport has a bit more nuance to it. I had a lot of trouble setting it up, but thanks to some help from other Mac admins (special…

  • 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…