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Proper Packaging Principles
After more than a decade of supporting mass deployments of macOS, I’ve personally seen my fair share of software packages for macOS, and far too many of them that have been downright garbage to manage at scale. In an attempt to help software developers, small and large, become better informed about software packaging and distribution…
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Login and Background Item Management in macOS Ventura 13
With the release of macOS Ventura 13, Apple has introduced a new Login and Background Item management feature (a.k.a. BTM – Background Task Management). This feature will notify users when “Login Items” are added to the system, and by default, allow any user to disable them. This has a few impacts on the user experience while…
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Trusted Testers
Trusted Testers is not a new concept, but it is an idea and term that I wanted to attempt to define more precisely. What is a Trusted Tester? A trusted tester is generally a user or customer that you can trust to provide feedback about early access or beta releases of software, operating systems, or…
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Apple Business/School Manager federated authentication user name conflicts FAQ
Can I see a list of user name (Apple ID) conflicts? Short answer: NoApple does not provide a method to see a list of the affected accounts. The most you will get is the number of accounts that are affected. Longer answer: You can work around this.Google Workspace – If you have enough access to…
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Application Layer Firewall Logging in macOS Monterey
I recently realized that Apple had added some new payload keys to the firewall payload (com.apple.security.firewall) with macOS Monterey 12. The first thing I noticed was the LoggingOption key, with 3 possible values – throttled, brief, and detail. Curious to know what each of these options meant (because of course they aren’t documented anywhere), I…
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Non-Apple Daemon Services
As Apple continues to change the ways we interact with launchd on macOS with the launchctl(1) command, I have been attempting to update my processes and code snippets, as well as those I find in some of the open source tools I use. The goal is to iterate and update alongside of Apple, rather than…
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macOS Version Naming Conventions
While digging through various Apple documentation, I’ve noticed an inconsistency in how macOS versions are referenced. The 4 most common examples that come to mind are macOS Monterey 12.0.1 macOS Monterey macOS 12.0.1 Monterey macOS 12.0.1 I asked some fellow MacAdmins in the MacAdmins Slack if there were any official guidelines from Apple about the…
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Revisiting Allowing Non-Admins to Manage Printers on macOS
Let’s face it, we can all agree that we hate printers. If IT had it their way, they would force everyone to “print digitally” to a PDF and forms would be filled out and submitted electronically (and don’t get me started on the users the print the form out, only to fill it out and…
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Hardening the security of PaperCut
In a time of seemingly rapid releases of SSL/TLS vulnerabilities (Heartbleed, POODLE, FREAK) I have found myself becoming more aware of my use and configuration of SSL/TLS in my environment. One of the tools (or links) I keep in my arsenal to help with this is the Qualys SSL Server Test. My security focus has recently turned to our…
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Creating a Java KeyStore (JKS) for PaperCut with KeyStore Explorer
Update 2018-03-13: PaperCut now has their own documentation for creating a Java KeyStore (JKS) using Keystore Explorer. You can see it over at https://www.papercut.com/kb/Main/SSLWithKeystoreExplorer — PaperCut does a pretty amazing job at documentation, but I have found that despite how good the documentation might be, sometimes the process itself can be cumbersome. One such example of…
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