258: One More Pajama Story

This show is brought to you commercial free, thanks to our Patreon sponsors!

Topics:

-Sam has a big announcement - HCS has acquired office space in South Norwalk, CT!  Pictures to come soon.  The only downside is he can no longer wear his pajamas to the weekly meetings.

-Joe was hoping to have some follow up from listeners about the Downloads folder not being in the Dock causing hangs in macOS

-Jerry asks Joe for follow up from MacStadium about an IP block that seems to think its in Russia

-Jerry asks the crew about upgrading to TeamViewer 13 and Joe riffs on how "un Mac-like" TeamViewer is as an app

-Jerry forks over a few bucks for disposable booties to wear at clients

-The old crew discusses styles of young people today

-What to do when Face ID doesn't work?

-Lost VPN credentials have been a recent issue for Joe

-Sam discovers Rumpus for Windows!  He may have been living under a rock but had no idea.

-Jerry has recently started working with Meraki products.  He mentions how you can sign up for their webinars and get free gear as well as a three year Meraki license.

-"Joe's Tech Korner" is back as he talks about issue related to Apple Remote Desktop and issues connecting to a Mac remotely.  Using quick thinking, he power cycled the switch remotely, which caused the computer to re-communicate with the network and allowed him back in.

-The group talks about an influx of spoofing emails appearing to come from Rackspace

-Jerry talks up CoRD as an excellent alternative to Microsoft Remote Desktop:
http://cord.sourceforge.net

252: Migrate Is Becoming A Trigger Word For Me

Topics:

-Joe has some follow up for same from Episode 223 "It's not you, it's me" about Mail notifications

-Sam follows up on his experience at the ACN Road Show in Santa Monica, CA

-Sam shares a story from one of our listeners that recovered a stolen MacBook Pro with assistance from the police department

-In working with a client, Joe discovers that Find My iPhone was off.  He also discussed enabling show last location, which is a handy feature.

-Sam tries to inject a new segment in the show, "Sam's travel corner"

-Jerry reminds us about taking a few moments to ask clients for an online review

-Jerry talks about an experience with a client that had a failed High Sierra upgrade - "macOS could not be installed on this computer" and used terminal to correct it:
diskutil list
diskutil umount force /dev/disk1
(Take note of your disk id. disk1 in my case)
diskutil apfs convert /dev/disk1

-We reference Mike Bombich from Carbon Copy Cloner and an APFS issue that was found when dealing with sparse images:
https://bombich.com/blog/2018/02/15/macos-may-lose-data-on-apfs-formatted-disk-images

-Not to be outdone, Joe introduces yet another segment, "Joe's Kuriosity Korner"

-A client that politely declined Joe's monthly services plan ends up with an issue with data loss after a liquid spill and the Apple Store replaced hardware.  PsiMac to the rescue: had her order the hard drive from Backblaze. It contained a full copy of her home folder, which brought her data back.  Two fallout issues were Keychain related and the Photos library.  

-Sam has an issue with spotlight and Outlook 2016 and found a more recent support article to deal with the issue using the mdimport command.  This was a welcome new approach to removing and rebuilding the spotlight database:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2741535/outlook-for-mac-search-returns-no-results-and-task-items-are-not-displ

-A story you have to hear to believe - Joe's client has an issue with sending emails from Outlook and coming out as gibberish to receivers.  After upgrading from Outlook 2011 to 2016, the issue remained.  In the end, an errant carriage return in one of her contact names caused this formatting issue to occur.

"Just re-index it dude" 
-Apparently Sam

236: MacBook Pro - Turn Back Time

Topics

• Root login issue

  • needs catchy name... “Higher Sierra. Even Higher Sierra? Too High Sierra...”

  • Joe wonders if FileVault was affected, assumes not. Probably need to log into existing user account first. From Addigy's email: "Gaining access to user accounts and turning off FileVault encryption"

  • ARD was susceptible. (Another reason not to forward ARD/SSH port from WAN to LAN!)

• Our friends at Addigy put out an immediate fix: https://www.addigy.com/fix-the-high-sierra-root-exploit
  

• Clients ask, "should I update to the new macOS?" We usually recommend waiting a few months, especially with the major filesystem changes in High Sierra. Our previous best practice was to recommend waiting until the 10.x.3 update. Should we go back to that recommendation? Note that the issue existed in the current beta of 10.13.2 in addition to the latest release of 10.13.1.

  • The sweet spot of macOS releases: 10.x.3 - 10.x.n

  • Note the latest release of each macOS version, e.g. 10.5.8, 10.6.8 v1.1, 10.7.5, 10.8.5, 10.9.5, 10.10.5, 10.11.6, 10.12.6, etc.

• Sam talks about "winging it" with a product he used to support - Canto Cumulus
  

• Jerry starts a good discussion about the current lines of MacBook Pro models and the changes that have not been well received. He mentions Marco Arment's blog posts
  -The best laptop ever made: https://marco.org/2017/11/14/best-laptop-ever
  -Fixing the MacBook Pro: https://marco.org/2017/11/24/fixing-the-macbook-pro
  

• Joe has some follow up on removing the Temp user account when the minus button is not available: you can also use Directory Utility. Open Directory Utility, authenticate as the Temp user, then remove the Temp user. Verify Temp user has been removed in Users & Groups, then manually delete home folder of Temp user. Note that we also tried changing the user's password from within the existing user (to avoid keychain issues) and it didn't work.

229: Interview wIth Taylor Boyko of SimpleMDM

October 10, 2017

TOPICS:

INTERVIEW:

SimpleMDM is the Apple iOS and macOS device manager that you've been waiting for. With modern, intuitive functionality, SimpleMDM gives you access to a cloud-hosted platform with advanced functionality usually reserved for convoluted enterprise suites. For instance, macOS native package installation, allowing you to install management tools like Chef, Munki or Puppet without having to install a cumbersome agent first. SimpleMDM provides additional features like location tracking, filevault key escrow, and support for multiple VPP and DEP accounts for integration into your zero-touch deployment workflow.

SimpleMDM sports a robust API, multiple admin users, 2-factor authentication and SAML support to integrate seamlessly with your admin environment.

Start your 30-day free trial today at SimpleMDM and have access to their US-based engineering team without having to deal with an aggressive sales team. Priced simply, with volume discounts, SimpleMDM won't require advanced math to calculate your annual spend. You can sign up to at simplemdm.com/ccp, and be sure to join #simplemdm in the Mac Admins Slack.

https://simplemdm.com/ccp

FOLLOWUP: 

•  Jerry provides some feedback to Sam and Joe regarding last weeks show about "burnout"

• Joe discusses some updates with removing the contents of the /private/var/folders/

• Think twice before encrypting your HFS+ volumes on High Sierra – Bombich

• Discussion regarding some limitations of the Apple Series 3 Watch when the iPhone is offline
  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205547
  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205783
  "To receive SMS, MMS, or push notifications from third-party apps on your Apple Watch Series 3 (GPS + Cellular), your paired iPhone must be powered on and connected to Wi-Fi or cellular, but it doesn't need to be nearby."

214: Hiding In The Server Room or Where The Buffalo Roam

Topics:

Jerry shares a story about working on an older MacBook Air that takes an interesting turn

Old tricks for retrieving data from dead hard drives are discussed. Do you risk it or go right to Drive Savers?

Sam makes an attempt to restore a file for a client and takes some time to hide out in the server room when he can't find it

Jerry goes through a scare with a Buffalo NAS when at a client site and comes up with a creative solution:
Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo 2-Bay 2 TB (2 x 1 TB) Network Attached Storage LS-W2.0TGL/R1 - https://www.amazon.com/Technology-LinkStation-Attached-LS-W2-0TGL-R1/dp/B001696ZXA

Paragon - ExtFS for Mac 11 - https://www.paragon-software.com/ufsdhome/extfs-mac/

ReclaiMe File Recovery Ultimate
to recover Windows and Linux PCs, Macs, and NASes - - http://www.reclaime.com

Working with multiple versions of software presents its challenges

Liquid spills and freezer tricks lead to a recent Apple development:

AppleCare+ for Mac now available:
MacBook Pro 13-inch: $269.00 (vs. $249 before?)
MacBook Pro 15-inch: $379.00
iMac: $169.00 (same as before!)
Get up to 3 years of accidental damage coverage and 24/7 expert telephone technical support from Apple, the people who know your Mac best.

The guys all have Late 2016 MacBook Pros and kick around the idea of upgrading to the latest model with Apple's hardware announcements

Use Etrecheck to search for legacy items that might be affecting your computer's performance:
https://www.etrecheck.com/

212: Live With Susan Chiz Berenguer of EmSpace Technology Consulting

We're sponsored this week by Watchman Monitoring, a favorite tool of ours that should be in every professional consultant's toolkit.

Visit WatchmanMonitoring.com/cmdctrlpwr and sign up for your free trial to find out how Watchman Monitoring can keep an eye on your client machines and notify you of over 100 issues. Be sure to tweet @cmdctrlpwr #CCPsentme to support the show!

This week Susan Chiz Berenguer of EmSpace Technology Consulting joins us for a conversation about her consulting practice and focusing on elder support.

EmSpace is an Independent Information Technology & Macintosh Services company, specializing in analyzing the needs and requirements of small to medium sized businesses, agencies and design firms with an emphasis on home-based clients, both on-site and via remote access. Clients rely upon EmSpace to analyze the state of their current systems, recommend the growth path necessary to enhance their production requirements, research features and develop cost/benefit analysis information. Once purchased; - install new hardware, firmware and software and train the appropriate personnel in its use and maintenance. On existing installations - advise and train clients in the practices of information archiving, memory management and network management and computing security.

http://emspaceplace.com
@emspace