Restarting Portfolio’s Services

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Portfolio Admin

As mentioned in my previous post, we’re currently cataloging around 40TB of data in Portfolio.

However, again as per the previous post, we’ve found some files to be troublesome causing issues cataloging. Once Portfolio attempts to catalog these files, the processes used can hang & get stuck on those files.

Portfolio then spawns more & more processes for the next files it finds until the box running Portfolio eventually runs out of resources.

To maintain the hosts uptime, we’re using the below script to restart the services daily.

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Portfolio, Parsing Logs To Find Troublesome Files

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Portfolio Admin

As mentioned before, we use Portfolio to archive old projects.

However since moving to Portfolio v1.x (from v11), we’ve had numerous issues. The main one has been getting the 40TB of data we host re-cataloged into Portfolio.

I’ve recently deep dived into Portfolio, & found some files that cause issues & these can be found via the logs. Parsing them allows me to “fix” the troublesome files or delete any corrupt ones.

Below is the how I’m parsing the logs.

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Box & Active Directory Federation Services

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We use Box as an enterprise file sharing & collaboration solution, with Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) as our Identity Provider (IdP).

However, there are some limitations with this setup which are not particularly detailed anywhere, just omitted.

Below are some of the limitations I’ve found.

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10.8.x Clients, JSS 9.73+ API & sslv3 alert handshake failure

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After being nerd sniped by @unknown_err in a channel on the MacAdmins.org Slack, I started writing some client side API scripts.

This lead to an issue with 10.8.x clients connecting to my JSS.

The below is why I saw these SSL errors & a two resolutions, one client side & another server side.

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Because Community

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So 2015 has been one hell of a year for me, a rollercoaster for sure.

Throughout, the Apple Admin community has been there. Either helping to make light of the various incidents that have befallen me during the year, some words of encouragement & also somethings to look forward too.

As such, it seemed a pertinent time to collate some various thoughts on why I blog, help out on JAMFNation, give talks & setup London Apple Admins.

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10.11.2: Cannot Enable ARD or VNC if /Library/Application Support/Apple/Remote Desktop is missing

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No-ScreenSharing

A issue was opened recently for AutoCasperNBI, where 10.11.2 NBI’s generated for not accessible over ARD or VNC.

Some digging revealed this this only affected NBI’s with the “Reduce Image Size” option selected.

NBI’s for 10.7.x – 10.11.1 work fine over ARD or VNC with that option selected, so some investigation was needed. Below is the investigative work, but you can also skip straight to the resolution.

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Retaining Enrolment User Information On AirWatch via the API

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AirWatch only keeps a record of the devices currently enrolled user, if the device is re-enrolled by/for someone else the details are overwritten.

Worse is that if your devices are not supervised, it’s trivial to unenroll a device. This then leaves a device record on AirWatch but with no user information.

To counter this, I’ve written the below API script that will add the enrolment users information to the devices notes. A new note is created with each scripts run, meaning that if a device is enrolled by another user, we’ll have a record & these notes are not deleted when a device is unenrolled.

This is detailed below.

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Deleting Unenrolled Devices via the AirWatch API

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We’ve started to look at enabling “Compliance Policies” within AirWatch.

However, these are scoped to “Assignment Groups” (was “Smart Groups”, another thing that seems to be mid-rename) & “Assignment Groups” do not have criteria for a devices “Enrolment Status”.

Below is an API script that I am using to automate device deletion if a device meets certain conditions & the method to the madness.

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Accessing AirWatch’s REST API with Python

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As mentioned in my previous post, I have been doing some work with AirWatch’s REST API & at the same time I have been learning Python.

This post is to show how you can access AirWatch’s REST API with Python to return devices information, as well as serve as a template for the scripts I use to access AirWatch’s REST API.

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How To Get The LocationGroupId For An Organisation Group For AirWatch API Calls

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I’ve recently been doing some work with AirWatch’s REST API.

One call required me to pass the LocationGroupId for an Organization Group, this is not readily available & the below are some methods that can be used to get the LocationGroupId for an Organization Group.

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