macadmin.fraserhess.com

Discoveries and solutions from my work administering Mac computers.

  • 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…

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  • 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…

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  • Using the xprotect command in macOS 15

    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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  • Plugging VoiceOver

    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…

  • Thoughts on the M4 Mac mini rumors

    It’s got to have an Ethernet port, right? Last week, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg reported that the Mac mini is getting its first major redesign in 14 years. This would be only the third Mac mini design. This year, I deployed Mac minis in most of our Zoom Rooms. Changes to the product line are…