238: Interview With Pepijn Bruienne Of DUO Security & The Mac Admins Podcast

Pepijn Bruienne is a Research and Development Engineer at Duo Security in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He breaks Macs to help his employer's customers be more secure. With more than a decade and a half of experience in a variety of Mac Admins areas, his skills include Systems Administration, Operations Management, Mac/Linux/Windows Server and Desktop integration, software deployment, configuration management and process automation.

Pepijn is also co-host of the popular Mac Admins Podcast and friend to our show.  Subscribe today and listen to Pepijn and the crew discuss all things in the Apple IT world.  Listen to the first Command Control Power/Mac Admins crossover show here:
https://podcast.macadmins.org/2017/10/01/episode-53-cultural-exchange-with-sam-valencia/

237: Beeping not Clicking

- Justin Esgar of the ACEs Conference and Will O'Neal, President of Mid-Atlantic Computer Solutions, join us to discuss ACEs 2018 in Baltimore, MD

- listeners get a 10% discount on ACEs Conference: https://acesconf.com/go/ccp

- Sam helped his Mom with iOS 11 update

- Jerry has MacBook Pro followup: he upgraded to a two year old machine

- buying on eBay

- selling used Macs on eBay or Mac Of All Trades

- Johnny Ive responds to criticism of MacBook Pro

- iPhone X impressions

- Sam fixed a failing drive that was beeping, not clicking: Opened up 2.5” hard drive to repair (moved the heads into park position while turning platter counterclockwise (it was beeping, NOT clicking)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNJqTPutrJ4

- The Piezoelectric Effect

- Text Expander Snippet For Email Advice

- High Sierra PSA courtesy of Jason Campbell, ZMS Consulting:

“Scenerio: A Mac workstation running High Sierra is working off a Mac server. The Mac server is running macOS Server.app 5. 

Issue: The lock files generated when opening files that live on the Mac server aren’t deleting when the file is closed. This causes ‘file in use’ messages when trying to open the file again. It times out in about 10 minutes but still another reason to hold off on upgrading businesses to High Sierra. Apple engineers are aware of this and are working to resolve.”

Credit to Jeff Satterwhite for finding the issue. He’s the owner of Post Mod Tech out of Austin, TX. He’s a longstanding ACN member and FileMaker developer. 

Thanks to our Patrons for sponsoring Command Control Power!

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.

234: Letting The Fox Into The Henhouse

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!

TOPICS:

Michael Thomsen, Director, Origin84 writes:
 

"I think that this is a particular time of year leading into the Christmas period where people can become a bit testy and start demanding things be done faster than usual for the arbitrary "have it in before the holiday" deadlines. Probably harder still in the NH given you're also headed into Fall/Winter.

Off-boarding is a great topic, and a fine art. Until you've had some experience with the good and bad it can be a minefield - especially if it was not your decision to end the relationship. 

As an anecdote we've just lost a contract for a fully Mac design client with on prem storage to a generic 'Cloud Services and Support Provider' who is going to save the company "thousands of dollars" per month by deprecating the on prem storage by moving them to Dropbox Business. 

While this was not what we would recommend or support it ultimately is the businesses decision however we have taken great pride in developing a rigorous but simple and straightforward off-board process more thorough than the new vendors on-boarding process - which in turn has caused some significant questions to be raised whether the new solution and vendor are fit for the job. 

We will continue to take the high road until we part ways, because ultimately once you're not working with a client the only thing they really remember is the way things were left when you walked out."

- Sam's Birthday 

- Apple "Hand Off" Mysterious Hack?

- Apple Genius Bar Diagnosis And Fixes

- High Sierra Installer Being Pushed Out By Apple

- Time Machine Glitch and Fix - Users seeing an error: URLs with the type "file:" are not supported, solved by changing name of Time Capsule disk; old name had a single quote in it

- Apple Watch Player - https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/watch-player/id1170672458?mt=8

- Clients Replacing Routers

- Apple vs Watchman - Identifying Hard Drive Errors and Sending your Client To the Apple Store

- Think twice before encrypting your HFS+ volumes on High Sierra
https://bombich.com/blog/2017/09/29/think-twice-before-encrypting-your-hfs-volumes-on-high-sierra

233: If I Could Turn Back Time

November 7, 2017

TOPICS:

- Sometimes sharing music in Apple Music using Messages doesn't work. Workaround: use "Copy" or maybe AirDrop works

- Discussion surrounding Apple Music, iTunes Match and streaming music.

- SpaceX lands rocket at sea, makes history - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEr9cPpuAx8

- followup on Joe's migration to G Suite: I've stopped seeing progress bars and large numbers counting up and down in my sleep, and I've stopped having nightmares about drag and drop targets
SHARED CONTACTS FOR GMAIL - https://www.gmailsharedcontacts.com

 when cleaning up old mail using your IMAP client with Gmail:

1) "When I mark a message in IMAP as deleted": change to "Auto-Expunge off - Wait for the client to update the server."

2) When a message is marked as deleted and expunged from the last visible IMAP folder: change to "Move the message to the Trash"

3) Under the Labels section, remove the check mark next to All Mail and Important so that those labels will not show in IMAP

- Sam tells about a client sending out bulk emails and wishing to set up their own email server.

- Joe Share his thoughts on his new iPhone X

- Sam shares a story about declining service to a potential problem client.

- Joe shares a story about helping a client hide selfie photos
ImageOptim makes images load faster - https://imageoptim.com/mac

- We'd like to thank all of our Patreon sponsors for their tremendous support of Command Control Power. You really help make the show possible. We've talked about burnout recently... This show has been a labor of love, and your support sends a signal that you appreciate what we're doing so it really helps encourage us to keep doing it and putting out a show every single week. We've released over 232 episodes over the course of the last four years! We really appreciate all 40 of our patrons. For this monthly live episode, we'd like to specifically thank those patrons that pledge at a certain level. You truly make the show possible and we really appreciate it.

-A big thank you to all of our Patreon sponsors!

232: CalDav Migration Madness & A Lost Package Perfect Storm

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!

TOPICS:

- Joe's switch to Google G Suite: BusyCal list view, 9999 days, sort by repeating events, calendar, etc.; Google Calendar: how are the interface arrows still not Retina?!

BusyCal took about 5 hours to delete all calendar events on Google G Suite, to reset calendar database (to resolve duplication without having to delete recreate all calendars and reconfigure all sharing settings)

Empty Trash in each of Google Calendars

Two Options in BusyCal: Option 1) File: Import (imports to a new local calendar), can be adjusted, reviewed, split, etc. locally and then events dragged and dropped into calendars on server; or Option 2) Drag and drop .ics file onto BusyCal icon in Dock, choose existing server calendar to import into

Google Calendar adds gross text to the end of the Notes field on every calendar event by default, unless you turn off this feature first:

-::~:~::~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~:~::~:~::-

Please do not edit this section of the description.

This event has a Google Hangouts video call.

Join: https://plus.google.com/hangouts/_/psimac.com/joe...

Gmail can only delegate the entire email account, rather than specific mailboxes (maybe because there's no concept of "Mailboxes", only "Labels"?). Does it even show in IMAP?