2024
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When sending an MDM command to lock or wipe a device, a six-digit passcode is required. Humans aren’t great at random numbers, so I made several attempts at a shell function that generates random passcodes. Read on or skip to the final solution. All solutions print the passcode and copy it to the clipboard. Attempt…
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UPDATE 1/13/2025: Thanks to a very helpful comment, I was able to remove the need for a manual login during this process. This is the third in a series of posts about Jamf Setup Manager. Read the first post to learn more about our decision to use it as our preferred tool for provisioning Macs.…
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When I deployed Zoom Rooms on Mac minis earlier this year, I assumed that the built-in automatic update functionality would run as the logged-in user. Our logged-in user for Zoom Rooms is not an admin, so I believed that an automatic app update would either fail or prompt for admin credentials. That would be a…
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iOS 18 supports Rich Communication Services (RCS) for a richer messaging experience with other mobile platforms. On our corporate networks, we found that RCS messages were not being received by clients. Our network policies are “deny all, permit by exception”, so our security team dug in to fix it. They found blocks for multiple carrier-related…
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This is the second in a series of posts about Jamf Setup Manager. Read the first post to learn more about our decision to use it as our preferred tool for provisioning Macs. Provisioning a server is the simplest of our Setup Manager provisioning processes. Prior to using Setup Manager, we had no formal process…
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I first became aware of Jamf Setup Manager during JNUC 2023. It is a tool for provisioning Macs and at that time it was in private beta. Developed by Jamf consulting engineers in Europe, it was recommended to me as a means of provisioning before any user logs in. Jamf Setup Manager’s primary mode is…
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Cisco Umbrella provides DNS security for organizations. It is built on Cisco’s purchase of OpenDNS in 2015. Cloud DNS resolvers provide filtering tailored to your organization. Roaming clients are protected by a module in Cisco Secure Client. The Umbrella client captures DNS queries and forwards them to the cloud resolvers. This week, I discovered a…
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macOS Sequoia 15 introduces a new privacy feature: randomized MAC addresses for Wi-Fi networks. Each Wi-Fi SSID gets a different random MAC address, instead of the network interface’s physical MAC address, in order to prevent tracking across public networks. This feature has been available on iOS since version 14. The macOS 15 TCP/IP stack uses…
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This year, we set out to build a more stable Zoom Rooms environment at the office. We took the philosophy of treating Zoom Rooms Macs like servers. Software updates would be installed during maintenance windows when the conference rooms weren’t in use. All automatic software update features were disabled via a configuration profile. Rather, software…
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Most Mac Admins have heard the announcement about VoiceOver during Setup Assistant. Many times. There’s even a t-shirt. My latest, and very cost effective, approach to muting this on my test computers is to use an audio cable from Dollar Tree. I picked up this short cable and promptly cut the jacks off with a…
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