Toronto Mac Admins Meetup
We had a Toronto Mac Admins meetup this past Tuesday (January 30, 2024). I’m gonna embed the video for you folks.
macOS
Mac Admins @ Penn State University
I was recently at Penn State University in State College, PA for the annual MacAdmins conference. I was there with my co-worker Rebecca. The two of use presented two topics and they’ve made their way to YouTube.
System software from developer “Apple Inc.” has been updated.
Apple wants end users to know what they’re authorizing and what system/kernel extensions are running on their computer. Yet I got this message. I have no idea what it is and what I’m authorizing. I know it’s from “Apple Inc.” but that’s it. There’s no GUI to show you what system/kernel extensions are running, so I have no idea what it is. I can run systemextensionsctl list but that gave me: I can run kextstat and I get the following, which doesn’t tell me what is pending approval or if any of them are unapproved. How am I supposed to know what is? Am I missing something? Am I supposed… Read More »System software from developer “Apple Inc.” has been updated.
Rename Computer using Scripting and Google Sheets
Google has made some changes that made this script not work, but it was an easy fix, once I bothered to look at why it wasn’t working. The page redirects to another page, and thus the cURL doesn’t work as usual. Instead you need to add the redirect flag to the cURL command so, instead of: You want: So the full script would be:
Missing Profiles Button in System Preferences
See my previous post for a full history on this. In it, I had migrated from WorkspaceONE to Mosyle. One some devices I needed to clear the profiles database to be able to remove WS1 and enroll with Mosyle. When you do that the Profiles button in System Preferences goes away, forever. Well, I did that one machine running macOS 10.14 and upgraded it to 10.15. Once upgraded, the profiles button returned! HOORAY!
macOS 11 Compatibily Check
Yesterday, Apple announced macOS 11. I need to know what members of my computer fleet are compatible. William Smith, aka talkingmoose, was kind enough to post the regex for what models are compatible with macOS 11. You can find that here. I tested Smith’s regex in BBEdit and it worked as expected. The question was, how do I get an easy list of my fleet in our MDM, Mosyle? I sent a Custom Command to my fleet, it’s here on GitHub. I told it to run that custom command on all computers and to store the results as “Big Sur.” So now I needed to use that data to create… Read More »macOS 11 Compatibily Check
zsh on macOS 10.15 Catalina
Back when bash was the default shell for macOS, I had updated the .bash_profile file to change the prompt on my computer. Well, that doesn’t work with zsh, it seems. In bash, I had it set by adding this line to the ~/.bash_profile file. export PS1=”\d \t \w 💩 ” Now in zsh is in the ~/.zshrc file, and just copying and pasting that into it didn’t work. It doesn’t seem to like the \ commands. Turns out that it now uses % commands, but it’s not a one to one relationship, so I thought I’d map it out to try to figure out what is what, because Googling… Read More »zsh on macOS 10.15 Catalina
Rename Computer using Scripting and Google Sheets
UPDATE: You need to allow redirects in your cURL by adding -L. See this post. With Apple’s Device Enrollment program, when a organization-owned device first turns on, it checks in with Device Enrollment and gets the information to know what MDM is managing it and how to contact it. That MDM system can then install what’s known as a bootstrapping package. In our old bootstrapping package, which was developed by an employee no longer here, was a giant if statement. If SerialNumber = x then set ComputerName to Bob, elseif SerialNumber = y then set ComputerName to Frank, elseif SerialNumber = z then set ComputerName to Jane. Pretty simple and… Read More »Rename Computer using Scripting and Google Sheets
OMG! APPLE IS GUTTING SERVER.APP!!!! Part 2 Web to Apache
In July, I will be presenting at MacAdmins at PSU. My talk will be called “OMG! APPLE IS GUTTING SERVER.APP!!!!” I will be using my blog to document all the processes taken to get all the data. The goal of this is to find easy ways to move away from Server.app while utilizing the existing Apple hardware in your server closet and macOS. Sure you can move to a new system, but you might not have the money or time. You can find the slide deck here. Server.app -> Apache First step is to test the server. After booting this VM, I visited my testserver. Mine was at testserver.leobaeck.ca. It… Read More »OMG! APPLE IS GUTTING SERVER.APP!!!! Part 2 Web to Apache
OMG! APPLE IS GUTTING SERVER.APP!!!! Part 1 Web to MAMP
In July, I will be presenting at MacAdmins at PSU. My talk will be called “OMG! APPLE IS GUTTING SERVER.APP!!!!” I will be using my blog to document all the processes taken to get all the data. The goal of this is to find easy ways to move away from Server.app while utilizing the existing Apple hardware in your server closet and macOS. Sure you can move to a new system, but you might not have the money or time. You can find the slide deck here. Server.app -> MAMP I started with a simple MunkiReport instance running in Server.app. I figured this would be using enough resources to move.… Read More »OMG! APPLE IS GUTTING SERVER.APP!!!! Part 1 Web to MAMP