MacBlog

29 April 2019 – 5 minute read

Sending Autopkg and JSSImporter Notifications to Google Hangouts Chat

Although Slack has seemingly taken over the world of workplace chat, my organization is a G Suite shop and we use Hangouts Chat for a majority of our internal communication. It’s included as a “core” G Suite app, so why not use the product we already have, right?

I wanted a way to post notifications to Hangsouts Chat rooms when autopkg downloads new software, or makes changes to our Jamf Pro server via JSSImporter. No solution existed. Building on the excellent Slack-centric work of both Graham R Pugh and Rich Trouton, I’ve made two different autopkg postprocessors to send autopkg notifications to Google Hangouts Chat.

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10 September 2018 – 6 minute read

Helping Your Users Reset TCC Privacy Policy Decisions

Taking a cue from iOS, Mac OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” introduced new systems to help users manage access requests to potentially sensitive and private personal information. When an app required access to a user’s Contacts, for instance, a consent prompt appeared on screen asking the user to allow or disallow this access.

Broadly, this system is known as TCC or transparency, consent and control.

With each version of macOS, Apple broadens the scope of privacy controls. The upcoming release of macOS Mojave expands these controls such that many previously-permitted interactions will require user consent. Prompts for consent appear only once when an action first requires approval.

With more to manage and only a single prompt to allow or disallow access, it can be opaque for users to understand the state of their system. Actions may fail with no clear indication as to why; a decision to disallow access is easily forgotten after many weeks or months.

Let’s create an easy method to reset these decisions to allow for a fresh start.

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03 August 2018 – 11 minute read

Signing Configuration Profiles

Apple has made it clear; MDM is the future.

As the preferred method of device management moves more and more to Configuration Profiles, administrators must turn their focus toward digital security.

Signing configuration profiles provides assurance of their origin, and an assertion their contents have not been modified in transit.

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04 February 2018 – 3 minute read

Express Setup, Location Services, Time Zone, and High Sierra

I recently ran into a snag with our Device Enrollment Program (DEP) workflow. Users were not being prompted to enable Location Services to automatically set the time zone, nor was the explicit Time Zone selection screen displayed during Setup Assistant.

The result was that devices wound up configured with the default Cupertino, CA location, and a Pacific time zone. We’re on the East coast – so we’d have to script a change of settings, or worse, have the user manually modify them.

As it turns out, this is an effect of the new “Express Setup” option in macOS High Sierra.

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30 January 2018 – 6 minute read

Automatically Renaming Computers from a Google Sheet with Jamf Pro

In a post-imaging, DEP-only world, maintaining your organization’s computer naming convention can be a challenge.

We can ease the pain with a little bit of Python, some clever interaction with the jamf binary, and a remotely-hosted Google Sheet.

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08 January 2018 – 8 minute read

Wait, is my Mac Up to Date?

So you’ve trained your users to use Jamf Pro’s Self Service to install third-party software, but how can we encourage users to self-manage macOS operating system updates?

Let’s create a user-centric, Self Service workflow for checking the status of available software updates.

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11 December 2017 – 7 minute read

Integrating DetectX Swift with Jamf Pro for Scheduled Malware Scanning

Sqwarq’s DetectX is an amazing shareware security tool that checks your Mac for malware, keyloggers, adware and potentially unwanted programs.

Recent updates to DetectX add the ability for administrators to initiate a scheduled scan from a management platform.

Neat! Let’s integrate it with Jamf Pro to scan and report on your fleet.

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06 December 2017 – 4 minute read

Creating a Naming Scheme for Jamf Pro

For maintaining a consistent, repeatable and intuitive administrative workflow, you need a naming scheme for objects in your Jamf Pro Server.

Here’s my take on a good strategy.

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29 November 2017 – 3 minute read

Off Root

Some quick notes on yesterday’s root privilege escalation vulnerability. Apple Released a Fix Security Update 2017-001 was released around 8am PST on November 29, 2017. This update resolves the issue leading to the privilege escalation. Installing the update recompiles and reinstalls opendirectoryd. The update does not require a reboot. The update also disables root again. While waiting on this fix, the smart move was to enable root and configure a strong password on the account.

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28 November 2017 – 3 minute read

On Root

Today was a very bad day for Apple. @lemiorhan tweeted a severe security vulnerability affecting all current versions of macOS High Sierra. A simple procedure allowed any user to perform a trivial root privilege escalation. Yikes. So how do we mitigate it?

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