Alan Siu's Blog

Tag: troubleshooting

  • 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…

  • Preventing alarms from going off on MDM’ed iPads

    If you have alarms set on iPads (either an actual alarm or an alarm from the “bedtime” portion of the Alarm app), you can’t disable the alarm by blocking the app. All blocking the app does is prevent the user from launching up the app. To prevent the alarm itself from going off, you have…

  • 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.…

  • If munkiimport doesn’t generate an installer_item_hash in the pkginfo file

    If you notice that running munkiimport on a .dmg doesn’t result in an installer_item_hash generating, you might want to also run makepkginfo on that .dmg to double-check it’s read-only: makepkginfo /PATH/TO/REPO/pkgs/PROBLEMITEM.dmg WARNING: /PATH/TO/REPO/pkgs/PROBLEMITEM.dmg is a writable disk image. Checksum verification is not supported. WARNING: Consider converting /PATH/TO/REPO/pkgs/PROBLEMITEM.dmg to a read-only diskimage.

  • “Grant access” problem when trying to open Word docs

    If you’re trying to open a Word doc, and it keeps saying you don’t have permission (even when you own the document), asking you to grant access to the document, and then still not giving you access; then just quit out of Word completely, and then launch it up again. The document should open fine…

  • Failing Adobe Acrobat DC updates

    Usually when new Acrobat updates come out, I can have clients pull them off the Munki server and install those updates automatically. Randomly, some clients will error out: installer: The upgrade failed (The Installer encountered an error that caused the installation to fail. Contact the software manufacturer for assistance.) installer:%42.031690 installer:PHASE:Preparing for installation… installer: Package…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Factory-resetting a disabled iOS device

    A user came in with a disabled iPhone (too many password attempts) and couldn’t factory reset it. We tried to get it into DFU mode, but we couldn’t easily. Turns out, if you just plug it into a computer that has Apple Configurator 2 installed, you can use Configurator to restore the device (without having…

  • 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,…

  • LockDown Browser in iOS crashes immediately after launch

    If LockDown Browser on your iPad opens and immediately crashes, the way to fix it is to uninstall and reinstall the app. Swiping away the app, updating the app, updating iOS, doing a home-power reset all do not fix this issue (at least not at the time of this writing).

  • Printopia Pro and “login not accepted” message

    If you use pycreateuserpkg to create a user or change its password, that will work great… except with Printopia Pro, which will prompt for a local admin username and password, and your local admin username and password will not work, and you’ll get a login not accepted error message instead. Deleting and re-adding the local…

  • Chrome Gmail unread messages not appearing in bold

    We had a user whose unread emails were appearing as bold in Safari (with an ugly font) and not bold at all in Chrome (font looked okay), and we did some digging and found the solution was to enable the Arial Bold font in Font Book on the user’s Mac, and it was all good.…

  • When you can’t draw, erase, or highlight in Notability on iOS

    A user wasn’t able to draw (with a finger) using the pen tool in Notability. Highlighting and erasing were also not working (just seemed to move the note about in Notability). We worked with the user on the usual troubleshooting steps (kill the app, do the home–power button reset, make sure iOS and Notability are…

  • Fix for Google Sheets error message: “Can’t save your changes. Copy any recent changes, then revert to an earlier revision”

    If you come across a message that Google Sheets can’t save your sheets and you need to revert to an earlier version, but even the earlier version can’t save, don’t bother doing any of these suggested steps. Clearing cookies won’t help. Disabling extensions won’t help. Instead, try this (as counterintuitive as it seems): copy and…