Kevin M. Cox

Microsoft now provides curated deferral channels for AutoUpdate

Kevin M. Cox October 20, 2021 8 Comments

February 25, 2024: There curated deferral channels are no longer being updated. Please read: Changes to Microsoft AutoUpdate deferral options

Microsoft’s Paul Bowden announced on Tuesday at Virtual JNUC 2021 that the company is now providing additional update channels that support deferring updates for periods of time and even pausing updates on specific versions of Microsoft Office for Mac.

While these new options were announced at JNUC and Jamf Pro has native support for configuring them, MacAdmins who use a different MDM can also utilize them with custom configuration profiles right away.

I reached out to Paul for more details and clarification on these exciting new options. Read on for the details.

Continue reading →

MAUCacheAdmin has been updated to version 3.0

Kevin M. Cox October 13, 2021 No Comments

MAUCacheAdmin was updated to version 3.0 this afternoon to account for a change in the CDN infrastructure that serves Microsoft Office for Mac updates. As was reported in the #microsoft-autoupdate channel of the MacAdmins Slack yesterday, version 2.9 was marking every package as corrupt and re-downloading them all on each run.

From Paul Bowden’s commit notes:

In the October 2021 update, Microsoft moved to a new CDN namespace (officecdnmac.microsoft.com) which supports HTTP/2

However, the previous version of MAUCacheAdmin relied on the HTTP/1.1 ‘Content-Length’ header – which is all lowercase in HTTP/2

So:
1. Changed awk search to grep -i as it’s still possible for the new CDN to emit a HTTP/1.1 response in some cases
2. Changed main URL definitions to new namespace of officecdnmac.microsoft.com

Also fixed up a few other problems:
* Removed MAU 3.x definition
* Added 365/2021 to existing 2019 title (visual change only)
* Updated copyright year

MacAdmins who run a MAU Manifest and/or Caching server should update to the latest version of the code to prevent these looping downloads.

Office 2021 information for MacAdmins

Kevin M. Cox September 17, 2021 1 Comment

On Sept. 16, Microsoft released Office LTSC for Mac 2021 to commercial customers ahead of the October 5 launch to general consumers. LTSC, or Long Term Servicing Channel, is the new official name of Office for customers with a perpetual Volume License.

If your company has Office 365 subscription licenses you can stop reading here. Nothing changes for you and your users will always have the latest features as soon as they are released. However if you deploy the Volume Serializer keep reading for what’s new.

Continue reading →

Allow standard users to manage printers with a Munki NoPkg

Kevin M. Cox August 18, 2021 3 Comments

Employees at our company all use Standard (non-admin) accounts on macOS and install printers via Managed Software Center. By default this only gives them the ability to install and uninstall in MSC, but not manage queues or add personal printers at home in System Preferences.

Thankfully a simple command that can be run to allow standard users to have that ability has been around for years:

dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -a staff -t group _lpadmin

(Variations of this script posted around the web include using everyone instead of staff and lpadmin instead of _lpadmin.)

In the past I have always enabled this feature with a payload-free package. However that didn’t present a way to confirm the setting is still active or provide an easy way to reverse it.

To solve those issues I decided to convert it to a Munki NoPkg with logic to do both.

Read on for the details:

Continue reading →

Baseball photography laptop stand

Kevin M. Cox July 4, 2021 No Comments

Shooting from the stands in an empty stadium during the 2020 COVID season was a unique experience.

I photograph a lot of Major League Baseball. The continually changing restrictions due to COVID-19 means we have been positioned in many different places at Minute Maid Park during the past two seasons.

Professional baseball photographers shoot, edit and transmit in a continuous cycle during the game; taking advantage of any slow down in play to catch up on the previous inning. This requires keeping our laptops close by as we are shooting the game.

I am frequently asked about the stand I use to hold my laptop for in-game editing so I decided to compile the details for easy sharing. Keep reading if you are interested.

Continue reading →

Installing AirPrinters “offline”

Kevin M. Cox December 10, 2020 1 Comment

In my last post, AirPrint Generator, I noted that one of the potential issues with programmatically installing AirPrinters is that the client computer needs to be able to actively communicate with the printer at the time of installation. This quickly came up in discussion on the MacAdmins Slack.

As I outlined there, we can work around this by generating the AirPrint PPDs and Icons, packaging them up and deploying them to the client computers ahead of time.

This method presents several advantages, read on for the details.

Continue reading →

AirPrint Generator

Kevin M. Cox December 2, 2020 7 Comments

MacAdmins have known for several years now that PPD files are deprecated and AirPrint is the way forward. However many of us have put off transitioning due to a lack of automated configuration options.

That all changed with the HP Printer Driver Certificate Fiasco of October 2020. With the first official remediation option being to reconfigure using AirPrint, this project suddenly moved up the to-do list for many admins, myself included.

Instead of continuing to make users sit through lengthy installs of HP’s enormous driver packages I decided to build on the work of others and create AirPrint_Generator. Read on for the details.

Continue reading →

Configuring MunkiReport Dashboards

Kevin M. Cox May 6, 2020 3 Comments

MunkiReport version 4, released over a year ago, added support for multiple customizable Dashboards. Previous releases allowed an admin to configure the homepage with selected widgets, but that was all.

The added Dashboard functionality gives admins the ability to have an unlimited number of customized views with particular widgets for different reporting needs that can be switched between using a menu or keyboard hotkeys.

This post was originally supposed to accompany my presentation at the Houston Apple Admins meetup in September 2019, but obviously I got a little behind.

The information is still relevant so read on if you are interested.

Continue reading →

Delete Zoom with a Munki NoPkg

Kevin M. Cox April 10, 2020 1 Comment

Zoom Video Communications has been in the news again lately, and not in a good way. Shortly after Google and the U.S. Senate made the decision to ban Zoom from all their devices my company followed suit.

We didn’t have Zoom installed on a large percentage of our computers, but I still needed a way to remove it now and in the future. Utilizing information shared by other MacAdmins, and the official documentation, I compiled a list of all files Zoom installs across macOS and wrote a script to search and destroy.

If the details could be helpful for you please read on.

Continue reading →

Deploying Photo Mechanic 6 with Munki

Kevin M. Cox January 9, 2020 3 Comments

Photo Mechanic 6 (PM), released last year, is a major overall to the venerable software used by photojournalists worldwide. It is now 64-bit for compatibility with macOS Catalina and includes a number of other changes from PM5.

Thankfully the ability to programmatically activate and deactivate is still there so only a few changes are needed in our Munki scripts.

What follows is basically the same as my post from last year, Deploying Photo Mechanic 5 with Munki, without all the background details, so read on if you want to see the changes needed to the scripts.

Continue reading →