macadmin.fraserhess.com

Discoveries and solutions from my work administering Mac computers.

  • Corporate firewall rule for RCS on iOS

    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…

  • Building Mac mini servers with Jamf Setup Manager

    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…

    ,

  • Going all in on Jamf Setup Manager

    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…

    ,

  • Cisco Umbrella, NXDOMAIN, and noNXDOMAIN

    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…

    ,

  • Handling MAC address randomization in macOS 15

    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…

    , ,