OSX

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Apple DEP/Apple Device Enrollment Debug Log

Posted on 16th June 2020

When building DEP Pre-Stage enrollments, you may wish to have eyes on some advanced logging output. We can turn on Debug mode for DEP/ADE on a per-machine basis by doing the following to that machine.

  1. Boot the machine into recovery mode after you have completed a clean install of the OS. (CMD + R at boot).
  2. Once booted, go to Utilities -> Terminal.
  3. Run the following 4 commands:
    • defaults write /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Preferences/com.apple.apsd EnableDetailedLogging -bool TRUE
    • defaults write /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Preferences/com.apple.MCXDebug debugOutput -2
    • defaults write /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Preferences/com.apple.MCXDebug collateLogs 1
    • touch /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/var/db/MDM_EnableDebug
  4. Quit Terminal and reboot the machine and begin your enrollment process. You will see a new log that will output to /Library/Logs/ManagedClient/ManagedClient.log

Once you have generated the log, you can disable the debugging mode by opening terminal while normally booted and logged into the OS.

  • sudo rm -f /var/db/MDM_EnableDebug
  • sudo rm -f /Library/Preferences/com.apple.MCXDebug.plist

Hopefully this helps you easily discover what is causing your enrollment process to fail.

28

Insignia NS-PCY5BMA Bluetooth 4.0, Macintosh Yosemite 10.10.2, and Handoff

Posted on 19th May 2015

Insignia NS-PCY5BMAWith the release of Yosemite and iOS 8.1, came a new way to connect the many Apple devices that one person can have. This method known as Continuity and Handoff allows a phone call to be answered on a Macintosh computer and transferred to an iPhone along with access to continuing to edit an email from one device to another. These are just a couple of examples of Apple’s new feature set. See Apple’s explanation here.

The feature is designed to work only with newer model Macs and can leave some of us, including Hackintoshers, out of the mix. The requirements call for Bluetooth 4.0 and certain WiFi chipsets to natively enable the feature. Some work from the community has given us the “Continuity Activation Enabler” for older Macs and can even work for some Hackintoshes that have a Bluetooth 4.0 adaptor that is natively support Out of the Box in Yosemite. A cheap Bluetooth adaptor can be found in a lot of places online, but local availability of a solution can be limited.

Best Buy sells at least one Bluetooth 4.0 dongle under their in-house brand Insignia model NS-PCY5BMA. Luckily for us, it sports the Broadcom BCM20702A0 chipset which OS X Yosemite supports, but just not in the Insignia flavor. To enable Handoff, we must get a working Bluetooth 4.0 adaptor at the start. The Insignia one can be used after it is enabled in OS X. What we will look at today is how to get OS X to recognize this adaptor, and then activate the Handoff feature. This guide should work for any adaptor that has the BCM20702A0, but is not recognized under the Bluetooth section in the System Information window.

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App of the Month: Fluid

Posted on 18th March 2014

fluid_logo_iconHave you ever wanted a stand alone Pandora or Google Music app for your Mac? Perhaps one for FaceBook or some other web service. As diverse as the Apple App Store has gotten over the years, popular web services like Pandora and Netflix do not have a stand-alone app that you can run outside of Safari. For some of us, that is perfectly fine. For others, having those services running outside of the current Safari (FireFox or Chome included) session is a good thing. Why? Perhaps you are running a dual-screen setup and want Netflix to run on the other screen. Sure, you could just run it in another window or another browser entirely.  But what if we could do that cleaner, neater, and just plain cooler!

In steps the App of the Month: Fluid

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Building a Install and Recovery Drive for Your Hackintosh

Posted on 15th March 2014

DiskWarrior IconRunning a modern Hackintosh has become fairly simple and straightforward these days. With the help of websites offering everything from installers to hardware compatibly charts, building a dream Mac is easily done. There is still a chance that something could break. It could be caused by a bad install, update, or even worse, a bad hard drive. What is fairly difficult is the fact that running hard drive diagnostics outside of a fully bootable Mac install may only allow you to test the physical drive. What about if is not a physical issue and is file system related?

That is where a great program from real Mac fame, DiskWarrior comes in to play for most. Sure, OSX has a built in drive verification utility and you could boot into single user mode and run fsck, but what if those fail? What if you can not boot into OSX at all? DiskWarrior does give you a disk image that can be booted off of, if it is a real Macintosh computer. It will not boot on non-Apple hardware. So what do you do then?

You boot to your recovery install of OSX.