ANNOUNCING: ADPassmon v2 fork

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UPDATE: My fork of ADPassMon has now been merged with main & many changes have been made, for more information follow this link. The Wiki on the GitHub project replaces the details below.

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Over the past two posts, I have detailed two issues with 10.9

  1. No Password Expiration Warning At The Login Window
  2. The “Local Items” keychain

In looking at resolving issue 1, I revisited Peter Bukowinski’s excellent ADPassMon. This is a great app, but has never quite suited my environment, as such I grabbed the code off of GitHub & got stuck in.

This has resulted in me, on this most foolish of days & with a nervous excitement, announcing my ADPassMon fork. In time I hope this fork joins the is committed to the main release.

So why did I go to all this trouble? What does it do? Read below.

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The “Local Items” Keychain In Mavericks

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UPDATE: My fork of ADPassMon has now been merged with main & many changes have been made, for more information follow this link.
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The “Local Items” keychain is something that you may have the misfortune of running into when changing passwords via an external directory service due to password expiry or a using forgetting their passwords in Mavericks.

I spent some time tackling it when forking ADPassMon to not only update Users passwords not via the pref pane, just through ADPassMon, & then also updating the users keychain password.

Below are my observations on the new keychain.

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No Password Expiry Warning At The Login Window On 10.9

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UPDATE: My fork of ADPassMon has now been merged with main & many changes have been made, for more information follow this link.
10.8 Password Expiration

Over the past few Mac OS revisions, you’ve been able to alert users to impending password expiry. Shown above is this on 10.8.

Below are details on how I set the above, and the issue with Mavericks

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How To Create An Never Booted OS.dmg Using Casper Admin

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UPDATE: AutoDMG makes this process, "stupid easy" so I'm going to move away from the below to using that tool. Also, if you're master distribution point is a JDS you cannot compile configurations. Again AutoDMG to the rescue.

Ever since Casper Admin has allowed for compiling configurations way back in the 10.5/6 days I have been successfully creating an OS.dmg via Casper Admin. I still use this method today & since 10.7 this DMG also includes the Restore Partition.

The end result is an DMG of the OS that has never been booted & is an asr image. Much like DMG’s created by InstaDMG & AutoDMG.

I’m not sure why I seem to be the only one doing this, but below is the how;

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iDevice Clients Offered A Blank Certificate On Password Change When Connecting To Wireless Using RADIUS Authentication

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We’ve been supporting iDevice clients for a few years now, but recently ran into an issue that even a Cisco TAC call & the ever helpful resources of JAMFNation & MacEnterprise we not able to resolve.

Our users authenticate to the wireless using their AD credentials, after a password change they should be prompted to enter their new password. Once done they should reconnect to the wireless.

Oddly, after a password change the iDevices started to be offered a blank cert such as that above

See below for more details

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Mavericks & Preference Caching

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Preference Caching is something that has been within OSX for some time, in Mountain Lion it was quite prominent with plists such as the Dock plist.

When Dockutil 1.1.4 was released it’s major change as noted in the release notes was to restart  this preference caching service called: cfprefsd, without which the settings written to the com.apple.dock.plist would later be overwritten.

So why am I mumbling along about this?

Well, recently i’ve been involved in discussions on this & wanted to post something to give others the heads up in case anyone else struggles with it.

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VPP 2.0 & “A Question Of Morality”

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Back in November last year, I posted some observations VPP 2.0, Mavericks, iLife ’13 & iWork ’13 which highlighted some of the technical difficulties with this new approach.

However, taking a step back we realised that we were going to struggle with licensing the software.

After several discussions with various Apple employees we came to a solution, which was summarised by the Apple employee as “a question of morality.”

So how did the conversations get to that point? Well, let me explain..

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iOS “Cannot Get Mail. The connection to the server failed.”

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Several months after going launching our BYOD scheme, we started getting reports from people that their iOS devices would fail to connect to our Exchange servers for company email.

They would fail with an error like that shown in the image above.

See below for more details on this issue.

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“Self Service has Encountered a Problem. Unable to contact the jamf binary. Your computer may have become unmanaged. You can make it managed by running Recon locally.”

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UPDATE: We've since updated to JSS 9.3 & we no longer have this issue.

Screen Shot 2014-01-17 at 10.03.00We recently updated our JSS from 8.73  > 9.22 & on the whole it’s been a non-event.

However, we started to find that some Self Service policies were erroring with the below message post the upgrade.

Below are the details on what we found, and a workaround.

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SharePoint Newsfeed iOS App “We couldn’t get new data right now, try again later.”

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Shortly after we resolved the an issue where the SharePoint Newsfeed iOS App was crashing, we found an issue where some people’s NewsFeed apps were getting the error  “We couldn’t get new data right now, try again later.”

There are actually 2 solutions to this error, the 2nd is below & more than a little bit of hair pulling was involved!

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