Technology Blog
Back in September 2021 a colleague on the MacAdmins Slack was looking for a way to programmatically enable the CUPS web interface on macOS. I had recently completed my article “Allow standard users to manage printers with a Munki NoPkg” and realized I could easily adapt it to handle this task.
This isn’t something I use in production but read on for the details if you think it could be helpful in your environment.
For years I have been manually cleaning up old packages on my Microsoft AutoUpdate caching server. Since I was having to manually move around collateral files for the Manifest Server component each month it wasn’t much extra work.
However now that I have switched from a custom Manifest Server to Microsoft’s official curated deferral channels, I wanted to configure my caching server to be completely hands-off.
Spurred on by a request on GitHub I decided to finally write some code to automate the cleanup process. The changes were merged into MAUCacheAdmin back on November 30. Read on for the details.
Historically I have always configured our MunkiReport Machine Groups with a configuration profile delivered via Munki. However starting with macOS Big Sur, the ability to manage profiles from the command line was removed meaning Munki can no longer install or remove them.
One option would have been to move these configuration profiles to our MDM as I did for our other profiles. However I didn’t want to duplicate the effort of managing computer group assignments in both Munki and MDM.
Since maintaining groups in Munki to aid in software deployments is still required, I decided to use NoPkgs to configure our MunkiReport Machine Groups. This way they will be automatically changed whenever a computer gets moved to a different group (via included manifest). Read on for the details.
February 25, 2024: There curated deferral channels are no longer being updated.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.
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.comAlso 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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.