Technology Blog
Version 4.70 of Microsoft AutoUpdate for Mac, released this week, brought an unexpected change to the Required Data Notice dialog.
I originally wrote about how to disable this dialog back in July 2019.
• Disabling Microsoft AutoUpdate’s new Required Data Notice in managed environments
This week’s change caught many MacAdmins by surprise but thankfully the cause and solution were quickly found by collaboration in Slack.
Read on for the details and solution…
macOS 14.4 includes a change that has the potential to impact a number of MacAdmins.
For the past couple years, launchctl kickstart has been widely used in an attempt to fix stuck macOS processes.
This first use came to prominence in relation to softwareupdate but more recently has been used for mdmclient as well.
MDM vendor Addigy even released a free tool, MDM Watchdog that uses kickstart to attempt to automatically remediate these issues.
Read on for details on why this might not work going forward.
Microsoft began offering curated deferral channels for AutoUpdate a little over two years ago. These feeds allowed MacAdmins to delay updates to Office apps for a set number of days, without having to run a custom manifest server themselves.
Unfortunately these deferral channels have recently stopped working, leaving many MacAdmins scrambling to adjust.
Thankfully the community has engaged Microsoft and have pushed for a solution.
Read on for the details on why this happened and how to adjust your configuration.
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…