November 2022 – MacAdmins Meeting

10 Nov November 2022 – MacAdmins Meeting

November 16, 2022 – University of Utah, MacAdmins Meeting

The University of Utah, MacAdmins Meeting is held monthly virtually on the 3rd Wednesday of each month at 11 AM Mountain Time. Presentations cover Apple technology and integration in a heterogeneous university enterprise environment. This month’s meeting will be held on Wed, November 16th, 2022 at 11 AM MT and we will provide live broadcasts and archives that will be made available 2-3 days after the meeting.

Apple Fall OS Release Update – Chris Coffelt, Apple

This presentation will cover the latest Apple OS releases and enterprises’ features & challenges and primarily focus on macOS.

Upgrade Deferral/Blocking
With the macOS Ventura release, many environments want to defer or block the update until it has been qualified & tested for their organization. Only macOS 12.6.1 and later can defer this new upgrade path using the major update delay setting. To give managed deployments more time to update to macOS 12.6.1, this new upgrade path will be disabled on any supervised Mac for at least 30 days from the release of macOS Ventura, and only the full installer path with be available.



Login and Background Item Management
Launch daemons, launch agents, and startup items are helper executables that macOS starts on behalf of the user that extend the capabilities of apps or provide additional capabilities to users. A LaunchDaemon can provide persistent background service for an application, a LaunchAgent can provide auxiliary UI capabilities like menu bar extras, and a LoginItem can provide the ability to automount remote directories or launch applications when the user logs in.

With macOS Ventura, there are new Login and Background Item management features that can be managed using a new MDM payload. This new MDM payload, which can only be installed on macOS Ventura using an MDM, prevents users from disabling managed Login and Background Items in System Settings > General > Login Items.  Items can be identified in the payload by bundle identifier, label, team identifier, or prefix that can identify multiple services. Items identified within the payload will trigger a single notification to the user instead of individual notifications for each service.

Application Management
With macOS Ventura, there will be a new Privacy Protection Control option that will allow or deny software to update or delete other applications which will impact Jamf Pro or Munki management of software via policies & patches, etc. Or uninstaller scripts or development binaries, etc.

About Chris Coffelt
Chris Coffelt has been with Apple for 8 years as a Systems Engineer supporting educational institutions. Before joining Apple, he was in public education for 16 years as an IT Director for school districts in Colorado and California.

     Note – Due to Apple policy this presentation will NOT be recorded and watching it live will be the only viewing option.  

Virtualization on Apple Silicon Macs – Howard Oakley, The Eclectic Light Company

One of the first questions, when we saw Apple’s early demonstrations of its new M1 Macs, was which other operating systems they could run. Thanks to research by the team developing Asahi Linux, it has become clear that Apple silicon Macs were designed to boot into alternative operating systems, as Asahi Linux does.

However, for many, the greater attraction is to be able to virtualize a guest operating system on host macOS. macOS Ventura completes features to enable the lightweight virtualization of recent versions of macOS, and a range of ARM-native Linux distros.

This talk explains how these work, how macOS can be used to run Docker-like containers, and how to run x86 code in Linux using Rosetta 2 translation. It gives insight into the strengths and limitations of lightweight virtualization, explains how virtual machines can achieve native performance, and suggests Apple has recently become so interested in virtualization.

About Howard Oakley

Howard writes for Mac|Life and MacFormat print magazines, and for his blog, The Eclectic Light Company, from which he also provides a wide range of free software utilities, including lightweight virtualization applications for both macOS and Linux guests on Apple silicon Macs. He first came to computing when training as a medical practitioner in the 1970s. His early interests were in numerical processing using maths coprocessors, and parallel computing with Transputers. From 1989 he developed CAD/CAM software for sailmaking and the design and manufacture of paragliders, initially running on Mac System 6. He also started writing technical articles for the UK magazine MacUser, which continued until it ceased publication in 2015, just after he had retired from medical practice. He has been a registered Mac developer since 1989.

His current interests are in the technical documentation of macOS, recently including XProtect Remediator, and investigating core allocation strategies and the performance of Apple silicon chips. He was among the first to offer lightweight virtualization applications for M1 Macs.
In addition to publishing medical research in thermal medicine, particularly local cold injury, in the 1990s he published research in machine learning using genetic programming.
Howard lives on the Isle of Wight, UK, just a couple of miles from the waters of the English Channel.

• Video – To view the archived presentation video, click here.
• Slides – To view the archived presentation slides, click here.

What’s new in swiftDialog – Bart Reardon, CSIRO

swiftDialog is a simple app that displays a dialog with specified content passed in from the command line. Its purpose is to act as a way to show an informative message to an end user, called via a script, and relay back the users’ actions.

swiftDialog’s interface is fully customizable allowing you to display images from files, and URLs or can even read the icon from an Application path. Every aspect of swiftDialog’s appearance can be modified.

At the most simple level, you need only give swiftDialog a Title and a Message to display but there is more utility in modifying other aspects of the appearance:

• Pass in an image resource to display as the swiftDialog icon, or use an app path or system preference bundle path, and swiftDialog will extract the icon for display.
• Add extra buttons. Change the text to say what you want. Wait for user input or automatically time out.
• Use markdown in the message to add bold or italics or include URL links
• Change the color, size, or even the font used in the Title and Message areas
• Change the size of the swiftDialog window
• Display Videos or Images either locally or pass in a URL
• Support for jamfHelper commands
• Text entry, dropdown lists, and checkboxes for gathering user input.
• Displayed content is dynamically updatable
  
  

This presentation will cover an overview of swiftDialog and its new features.

About Bart Reardon

Bart has worked for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) for over 20 years and is based in Canberra, Australia. He currently works for CSIRO’s desktop infrastructure team and leads development for the Mac and Linux Desktop SOEs and manages 1500 workstations using JAMF, Munki, puppet, and other open source tools as well as has provided contributions to Munki, macOSLAPS and Nudge, and is currently developing swiftDialog.

• Video – To view the archived presentation video, click here.
• Slides – To view the archived presentation slides, click here.

Open Discussion

Questions, comments, problems, and fixes.

Directions

Due to the coronavirus (aka Covid-19) crisis, this meeting will not be meeting in person but will currently be done virtually using Zoom video communications architecture.