Technology Blog
Munki has been a staple management tool for many MacAdmins for a decade.
However in recent releases of macOS, Munki needs to be granted Privacy Preferences Policy Control permissions to access certain disk locations or update some apps.
Thankfully this has become very easy in the past year thanks to the MacAdmins community.
Read on for details and an example configuration profile.
Apple released macOS 14 Sonoma this week, and on top of the numerous consumer facing features, there are also a number of interest to MacAdmins.
• What’s new for enterprise in macOS Sonoma
While there are many improvements to features like Declarative Device Management (DDM) and MDM, one of the most interesting to me only got a short mention with no details.
Automated Device Enrollment can be enforced after Setup Assistant.
This feature, which I’m calling Retroactive Automated Device Enrollment, was announced during WWDC and I extensively tested it during the beta cycles.
I think there is some amazing potential here. Read on for details…
We are always looking for ways to reduce friction for end users. Our job in IT is to empower users to get their work done with as few technological distractions as possible.
Many times Apple makes this harder due to features or functionality in macOS. One such example is Keyboard Setup Assistant (KSA) which automatically launches anytime a new input device is detected.
While this is very helpful for consumers who have purchased a new peripheral; in a corporate setting it can be an annoyance multiplied thousands of times over.
YubiKeys present to macOS as keyboards and trigger KSA. When rolling them out we decided to use a Munki NoPkg to save our co-workers from having to dismiss this useless dialog.
Read on for the details…
MunkiReport 5.8 was released today and primarily includes compatibility with Python 3 and PHP 8.
Just like last year’s release of 5.7, this new version of MunkiReport requires admins to deploy a specific Python package to clients before updating.
It will also likely require a coordinated update on your web server to enable PHP 8.
Read on for the details…
CREDIT: flaticon.com
Troubleshooting with remote users can often be a challenge.
This is especially true when you need to see logs stored in hidden folders that users can’t easily find.
To make this process easier for both IT and our staff we added a Self-Service item to Managed Software Center to easily gather everything we need.
Read on for the details…
Troubleshooting VPN issues can be tricky for end users.
When we started to see recurring issues with AWS VPN, our Cloud team asked us to make it easier to gather logs and run diagnostics.
We already utilize Managed Software Center for Self-Service so a Munki NoPkg was the logical solution.
The result is a script that gathers all the requested information and makes it easy for users to share with just one click.
Read on for the details…
Apple changed the process for enrolling in macOS beta seeds beginning with 13.4 released in May 2023.
What could previously be automated via the seedutil command line tool now requires user interaction.
Thankfully we can still use Managed Software Center to make this process easier for users.
Read on for the details…
A very annoying bug in the latest release of Workspace ONE Intelligent Hub caused us to uninstall it from our macOS fleet using Munki.
Last week VMware released version 23.04.0 and the users in our testing group were immediately bombarded with a confusing error dialog. These errors would appear repeatedly throughout the day and worst of all, steal focus every time.
We halted the rollout and immediately engaged VMware support who confirmed the issue isn’t isolated to our tenant. Multiple customers are experiencing the bug including others in the #workspaceone channel on the MacAdmins Slack.
However despite pulling 24.04 from Munki and making sure automatic updates were disabled in our WS1 console, the install count continued to climb. With no resolution in sight from VMware we decided to remove 24.04 from our fleet completely.
So much for Read-Only Friday! Read on for the details…
A frequent request for the open source tool Nudge is local timezone support. Nudge was coded to use UTC for configuring and enforcing the installation deadline for macOS updates.
This means that global companies have had to pick a single deadline for their entire fleet. Alternatively they could deploy multiple configurations for different regions. Neither option is ideal.
Bob Gendler set out to code a local timezone feature only to find out, to everyone’s surprise, that it already exists!
Read on for the details…
Starting with the release of Office for Mac 2016 then continuing with 2019, 2021 and O365, Microsoft has always released updates for the core Office apps on a monthly basis.
That’s about to change, kind of…
In February, Microsoft announced (login required) that updates to Outlook for Mac would soon start releasing weekly. That change goes live tomorrow, March 21, 2023.
Read on for the details…