Scripting

Updating Safari Extensions

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Extension

As blogged here, here & here I’ve had some fun deploying & creating Safari Extensions.

Recently I needed to update our deployed Extension Bar & like a daft person I didn’t follow Apple’s advised Extension update method..

However, past me was not that daft & had already discovered that all that is needed to “update” an existing Extension is to replace it. Which is pretty much what the below script does.

Many thanks to Peter Bukowinski & Erik Berglund for helping me with this in the #bash channel in the macadmins Slack.

See below for the script

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How To: Change the “Automatic Proxy Configuration” url in System Preferences via a Script

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The “Automatic Proxy Configuration” url in System Preferences is used to point the clients to a PAC file to set the proxy server when on the Office LAN. Below are some scripts to manage this setting.

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How To: Get the currently logged in user, in a more Apple approved way

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NOTE: Due to macOS Monterey's prompts when Python 2 in invoked, please review the blog post here to get the logged in user instead.

When running scripts via Jamf Pro, Munki or a launch daemon, you sometimes have a challenge to get the username of the currently logged in user.

Below has a method to achieve this, with a link to an Apple approved method.

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Check EFI Password State Extension Attribute

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JAMF have a great article on deploying the binary needed to set a firmware password on 2010+ Macs via the Casper Suite, here.

I recently had a chance to play with it, but found that the below command (which is used by the following EA to check EFI Password status) often returns nothing or just 0 after running. Regardless if an EFI password is set or not.

sudo /Library/Application\ Support/JAMF/bin/setregproptool -c

So below is a different version of the before linked Extension Attribute, using “expect” & maybe a inelegant check.. but hey, if it works!

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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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Apple Software Update Server Updates Stuck Waiting

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We cascade  Apple Software Update Server (read: ASUS), from a Master Server on our WAN as per the post here. So once an update is downloaded to the Master ASUS, the Replica’s should just replicate the updates.

This has worked great for a time, but we were missing some updates on a couple of servers. When looking in Server.app at the Software Update service it appeared that the missing updates status was “Waiting…”

Below can be found more details on the issue and the resolution.

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How To Change The Apple Software Update Server Sync Interval

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By default Apple Software Update Server’s (READ: ASUS) sync daily with Apple at 3am.

But this can be changed, & the below script can be ran to change the interval. You can change either the time of day the sync runs or change it to once a week.

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iTunes Error: “You do not have enough access privileges for this operation.” (-45054).

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After migrating to a new Mac I was getting the errors above when launching iTunes.

Below is why I was seeing these errors, and how I resolved.

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Spinning Beachball when coming out of sleep or when deactivating the screen saver

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We set our Macs to require a password when woken from sleep or the screensaver.

Around the beginning of November several of our 10.8.x Mac users started to advise that they were seeing the dreaded spinning beachball/pinwheel when trying to wake their Macs.

It appears we were not alone in this issue.

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How To: Set a Macs Time Server

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Date&Time

A recent post showed how to forcibly update a Macs time against a given NTP server, i’ve since been asked how to set the Macs NTP server.

This post will try & show you how.

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