254: What's up, Dock?

Topics:

-This week's show is brought to you by FLEXdesk - your help desk support that grows with your company.  Go to rootedconsulting.org/flexdesk to find out more.

-Jerry takes over Joe's Peeves Corner as he gripes about Apple Remote Desktop and its annoying habit of jumping to different computers when it is populating a list

-It brings up the topic of Addigy and their remote access client and its speedy and reliable access.  Also Addigy's SSH/command line capabilities to perhaps kickstart Apple Remote Desktop.

-Joe talks about users enabling Printer Sharing.  If users turn it on and people connect through it, changing the host computer's name in System Preferences>Sharing will cause shared users to no longer be able to use it.

-Continuing failed updates with High Sierra and the now infamous "missing or damaged" error

-It reminds Joe of a story where a client had a firmware password on a Mac that was acquired from a previous user.  In a similar situation where the Apple Store could not/would not unlock it.  They extracted the hard drive, installed it in another system and wiped/updated it.  They then placed it back in the original iMac and it successfully booted.

-Jerry floats a conspiracy theory as to why these installer issues have been so rampant

"Joe's Tech Clinic" - After an upgrade to High Sierra, the Dock and Finder were slow to respond after booting each time.  Subsequent downloads would cause the Dock to then be unresponsive, once complete.  Joe attempted many fixes: resetting launch services, removing /var/folders contents (except zz), safe boot, resetting NVRAM, SMC, nada.  Also tried trashing Dock preferences and rebuilt manually.  A key was that the Downloads folder was not in the Dock.  Unbelievably, adding it to the Dock corrected the issue!

-A nice addition to the show is additional audio from our interview with Justin Maxwell of smith.ai and Keypad.  Justin talks about his time working for Apple.

-The rumor about being caught in an elevator with Steve Jobs turns out to be true!

-Justin and his wife were at Apple during the famous "I'm a Mac" commercials.  He talks about the underdog mentality that made for a very exciting time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfv6Ah_MVJU

-He was on the team that created and released Aperture

-Joe remembers the time of the release of the Intel processor.  At that time, Justin was part of the team building the iLife website (in Flash!).  At that time, Adobe decided not to release Flash for the intel processors.  Justin's team had to rebuild the entire website, working through holidays and weekends to meet a deadline.  Released the morning of MacWorld, Steve Jobs hated it!  Justin kept a little memento to remind him of that time in his life.

-Of the many things that Justin learned from all of this, Steve was almost always right. He always thought of the user first.

253: Interview with Justin Maxwell of Smith.ai & Keypad

Justin Maxwell of Smith.ai and Keypad joins us for an incredibly informative and in depth interview.  Most recently the design lead for Google’s Android Auto, Justin has designed products and built teams for Google, Apple, Mint (Intuit), Sony, and plenty of startups along the way.  Here are two of Justin's offerings that we discuss on Command Control Power:

-Smith.ai is a superior call answering & intake service for small & solo businesses. Their live, U.S.-based virtual receptionists capture & qualify leads, book new clients, and build better relationships with your existing clients.

-Keypad is the most advanced & affordable cloud phone system for small businesses.  Keypad offers call routing, call analytics, and many customizations to help you track your performance, and convert more leads.

-Justin takes us through not only the story of how he brought these businesses to life but his life at Apple as an interaction designer for Apple.com

-As we talk Smith.ai, Justin describes the look and feel of the site and how it relates to their customers

-Smith.ai acts as your virtual receptionist, to provide a layer between customers and your business.  At the same time, they are able to weed out all of the spam or unnecessary calls.

-Justin was mint.com's first UX hire and gave him good perspective on small businesses and their needs

-Their team essentially followed around small businesses over the course of a Summer to figure out what their needs were and what they found was that phone calls were the biggest pain point

-Instead of being a brick & mortar company, they utilized VoIP technology and highly skilled employees working from their locations

-"It all starts with a phone call"

-Jerry can't imagine running his business without Smith.ai at this point.  Even just not having to answer calls at client sites to try and make a sale

-Smith.ai's system uses machine learning to help the receptionists make the right decisions over the course of a call and provide the correct answers, versus reading from a script

-Joe & Justin discuss their easy to understand pricing as opposed to minute based pricing

-Keypad is an excellent complement to the Smith.ai service.  Instead of using services like Ring Central, Google Voice or Grasshopper, which can add latency to a call, they developed Keypad.

-You can sign up for the beta of Keypad here

-Simplicity is a focus of Keypad because of feedback the team has received about similar service offerings

-Justin discusses analytics to understand when volume is high or knowing when you need additional support

-Jerry mentions a possible higher tier offering for VIP support and how to tie it in to our monthly services plans

-Joe signs up right here on the show!

-Look out for service offerings in the chat space from Justin's team

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

251: Some Serious 'Splainin' About Apple Products

Come see our live show at ACEs 2018!
acesconf.com/ccp

• 'Splainin': Originally derived from the TV series I Love Lucy: to give a false explanation to something you are trying to hide.

• Jerry mentions tracking slow times on the calendar for future reference and reflection

• Jerry picks Joe’s brain about different types of labor scenarios and how PsiMac offers labor services

• Joe and Jerry discuss the need to constantly reevaluate the optimal age of a Mac that might be a candidate for upgrade. When is it worth upgrading 2011-2012 iMacs?

• Jerry recommends the iFixIt Pro program for resellers to get a better rate on parts including the adhesive kit for 2012 and newer iMacs

• Jerry revisits the Mouse Jiggler app from Episode 246: Let Go Of My Echo or Echo Location that helped his Fusion Drive encryption proceed, and shares some excellent feedback from Tom Bridge re: encryption requiring the mouse to be moving. Tom suspected Apple is "using the entropy from the mouse cursor to do part of the encryption" which is apparently the case in High Sierra with APFS (although Jerry's drive was not APFS). See also: The Lava Lamps That Help Keep The Internet Secure

• installing MalwareBytes on High Sierra requires manually allowing the kernel extension to run by clicking Allow in System Preferences: Security & Privacy: General. It appears that it cannot be done using TeamViewer, or perhaps other remote access software e.g. Screen Sharing either. It must be clicked by a local user. See MalwareBytes forum posts 1 and 2

• the MalwareBytes kernel extension issue reminds Joe of an old issue where Keychain Access prompts for login password would require a local user with a physical mouse to click the Allow button. We discussed it two years ago in February 2016, in Episode 140: Tom Bridge of Technolutionary.com - Go iPad Pro or Go Home, in which we discuss the Apple security note About the security content of OS X El Capitan 10.11.1, Security Update 2015-004 Yosemite, and Security Update 2015-007 Mavericks, which explains a change to SecurityAgent: "Impact: A malicious application can programmatically control keychain access prompts. Description: A method existed for applications to create synthetic clicks on keychain prompts. This was addressed by disabling synthetic clicks." Also, we followed up in the very next episode, 141: Keep Your "clicks" Local and Organic!

• In honor of all the new segments (Joe's Conspiracy Corner and Think Like a Client), Jerry and Joe both bring back an old segment and share an "I Should Have Known This"

• Jerry shares a tip courtesy of our very own Sam Valencia: how to find which volume is the startup disk in Terminal

• Joe shares where the setting is to turn off the Offload Unused Apps feature: in Settings: iTunes & App Store

• Jerry brings up the 'Splainin' we sometimes have to do on Apple's behalf

• To round out the show, we share some of the challenges and confusion clients can feel when trying to decide on a new Mac or an upgrade

250: Interview - Justin Esgar of ACES Conference, Adam Engst Of Tidbits Contenet Network & Adam Rice of AdamRice.org .

Join us all at ACEs Conference on May 9th & 10th in Baltimore, MD! 
https://acesconf.com/ccp

ACEs Conference was created for one reason and one reason only:
To help IT consultants grow their companies.

With unique, premium content delivered by world-class speakers, ACEs Conference is the place for inspiration, ideas, business networking, and instantly-applicable knowledge. It’s no surprise that our attendees continue coming year after year—just one ACEs Conference and you’ll be sold.

Justin esgar

Adam engst

adam rice

Our Guests This Week:
Justin Esgar - Founder and creator of ACEs Conference
Adam Engst - TidBITS Content Network & speaker at ACEs - https://tcn.tidbits.com
Adam Rice - Fellow ACN and ACEs attendee extraordinaire - https://adamrice.org

Just some of the great features of ACEs Conference 2018:
-Sit Down with Charles Edge - Panel Discussion
-Adam Engst will be Moderating a marketing panel
-Mark Berman - Journey Mapping (to be revealed)

-A general discussion brews about how marketing works within the world of small business

-Find that one "golden nugget" that resonates the most with you and introduces new way to thinking about things

-Jerry brings up an excellent question that Justin answers about business owners that may think they know the lay of the land and what ACEs can do for them

-Adam Rice discusses his business location, clientele, and how his first ACEs opened his eyes

-Justin talks about the ACEs Mastermind Group, which continues the conversation after the conference: https://www.acesmastermind.com

-Addigy will be holding a welcome party overlooking Camden Yards on May 8th.  Join us there!

-Tickets are $529 but using the code CCP will give you a 10% discount.  Use your code before prices go up!

-Command Control Power will be doing a Live Show at ACEs Conference 2018 on day 1.  We hope to see you there.

249: Live Show - A Series Of Unfortunate Events

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 calls back to a 27" iMac hinge repair.  Sam & Joe have both used https://www.themachack.com to hold up the display.  But Joe references that Apple will reimburse customers with proof of repair.

-TI83 Calculator was Joe's calculator of choice in high school.  You can still get one on Amazon!
https://www.amazon.com/Texas-Instruments-TI-83-Graphing-Calculator/dp/B00001N2QU

-The Jiggler was a handy program Jerry had used to keep FileVault moving along.  But unfortunately he has some follow up news regarding FileVault that wasn't so great.

-The team discusses fusion drives and weighing cost options for clients

-Joe introduces a new segment to the show, "Joe's Konspiracy Korner"
In this week's konspiracy, Joe throws around theories about a rash of errors on macOS computers. - "macOS could not be installed on your computer.  The path /System/Installation/Packages/OSInstall.mpkg appears to be missing or damaged"
Some solutions offered from Stack Exchange - https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/299808/high-sierra-the-path-system-installation-packages-osinstall-mpkg-appears-to-b

-Sam got bleeped! Guess the banned word and we'll give you credit on the show!

-Sam brings up a scenario where a client lost her iPhone with Find My iPhone off and a lost iTunes backup password.  Jerry offers a possible solution in LCOM Soft:
https://www.elcomsoft.com/

-Some Synology follow up from Sam regarding rebuilding a RAID.  This was discussed on an Episode 241 with Weldon Dodd.

-Jerry has some rave reviews about a podcast app for Apple Watch called Outcast
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/outcast-for-apple-watch/

Some more of Jerry's reviews:
PopClip Extensions
pilotmoon.com/popclip/

Card Hop
https://flexibits.com/cardhop

-Joe's pop quiz: how is a shut down and cold boot different from a restart?

-Another new segment from Joe!  How to think like a client?
This week: Backups.  A client wouldn't realize that the key to laptops backing up reliably is to plug them into power while they are open and awake, unless they support Power Nap (Dark Wake). The default setting is not to back up while on battery power.

-One of Jerry's clients has an issue where she thought all of her documents appearing as My Documents.zip.  The explanation is something we have all encountered before.

-How much time have you spent assisting clients with downloading and running TeamViewer?

THANK YOU TO OUR PATREON SPONSORS!

247: Interview with Michael Thomsen, Director, Origin84

- Michael Thomsen, Director at Origin84, Proactive Support Professional, Sydney, Australia
Origin84 is an Apple-focussed technology consultancy based in Surry Hills, NSW.

Michael has spent over ten years of working professionally alongside the sales and service branches of Apple Australia. He has gained a deep understanding of the complexities and uniqueness of selling and supporting Apple branded equipment. 

After 8 years of independent consulting he founded Origin84 in 2015 to meet the opening in the Australian market for a mid size Apple focussed support and management consultancy. Over the past 12 months Origin84 has grown to be a premiere supplier of premium professional services in Australia to the advertising, marketing and banking sectors - or any company who rely on Macs to make their living. Origin84 has also been specifically sought out to work with a number of international and multinational clientele.

Topics:

-Joe remembers the kind gift that Michael gave us during the live ACEs show last year

-Home users are not part of Origin 84's business focus

-Requirements for ACNs outside of the US are different and some of those details come in to focus

-Australia has a small market and is heavily regulated and Michael gives us his thoughts and process

-Michael changed his model from ordering application licenses to having the client purchase, thereby adjusting risk/reward ratio.  It also empowers the client as opposed to you holding all the keys and a false sense of job security.

-As Jerry comments on Michael’s keen business acumen, he talks about his influences

-An interesting discussion brews about putting profit first, then factor in all of your costs

-Sound advice about considering margins in your timing to allow for less stress on your team to get the job done right instead of worrying about the clock
Shaun Blanc - https://shawnblanc.net/margin/

-“I don’t like apologizing”.  Michael goes on to talk about not making mistakes, and that’s where time comes in as a benefit for your engineers as well as the clients.

-Joe brings up the origin of the Origin 84 name (here’s a hint, the year 1984 plays a role)

-A deeper dive about the ACN program not only outside of the United States, but what the ACN of the future will look like.

- "Whip-smart ideas and advice for businesses who earn a living with their Macs."
         -Michael Thomsen

Origin Eighty-Four PTY Limited
1 Ann Street, Surry Hills, Sydney, NSW, 2010
Call: 1300 800 936

Here is an example of Origin84's unique vision of working with their customers

246: Let Go Of My Echo or Echo Location

Topics:

Will you be at ACEs 2018? Join us there & catch a live show!
Register Here:
https://acesconf.com/ccp

-Joe has some follow up on the Gmail Bcc mystery

-A talk about the latest ACN announcements, including the ACN Roadshow.  Joe will be attending in NYC on March 13th and Sam will be in Santa Monica on February 21st.

-Jerry has a very odd story about ordering an Echo for a customer via his Amazon account

-A macOS Server PSA from Joe - Apple Support article about changes coming in macOS Server

-Sam hasn't had a lot of affection for Airport Extremes but this latest issue with firewall settings and port forwarding not working doesn't give him the warm & fuzzies

-Jerry has an issue with a possibly bad Samsung Evo 850 and ends up replacing it within another with success
Etrecheck.com is a handy tool he has used to detect software & hardware problems on Macs

-Have you heard Jerry mention Occam's Razor on show's past.  Curious as to what the reference is?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

-220/221 Volts Whatever it takes? - YouTube (Mr. Mom reference!)

-Joe attempts a pop quiz about Photos and the All Photos vs Photos view

-Sam has to secretly Google "how to pair Air Pods" while at a client

-While Jerry is on-site to work on a Synology, he is asked to assist with a problem iMac.  As it turned out, he was sending them Watchman alerts all along about a drive failure.

-Joe has some follow up on MacBook Pro uptime; MacBook Pro with slow wake from sleep after closing lid? Try restarting! Slow changing network interfaces? Try restarting!

-Encryption a Fusion drive with FileVault was proving to be a long and arduous process for Jerry.  Only periodically moving the mouse would force it to progress again.  Jerry found a free app called "Jiggler" to keep the mouse active periodically. 
http://www.sticksoftware.com/software/Jiggler.html
To see the status of the encryption process, he used this command:
diskutil cs list | grep “Conversion Progress” 

245: Updates & Followup Fiesta

Topics:

- High Sierra 10.13.3 was released today, which makes sense as Joe just updated his PsiTool drives yesterday. Also released were iOS 11.2.5, Safari updates for 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, and Security Update 2018-001. Note that security updates are padded to three digits... At the rate we're going, might Apple hit 100 security updates this year? That's one every three days!

- If you want to get emails from Apple about product security when updates are released, subscribe to the Security-announce list

-Jerry came to the rescue of a client who wanted to clean up her inbox.  He found that Google provides a URL to request missing emails:
https://support.google.com/mail/contact/missingemails

-Sam has been experiencing an issue where replying to a selected message in Apple Mail actually creates a reply to the incorrect message.  A similar issue has occurred to him in voicemails.  At this point Jerry thinks Sam needs to have his eyes checked.

-Jerry gives us an update on his virtual receptionists, Smith.ai as Sam is exploring similar options.  A natural progression would be a service that can not only answer calls, but support your clients like our recent sponsor, FLEXdesk

-In a recent support call with a client, Jerry finds that their MacBook Air had a failed SSD module. These situations can lead to having to explain the "why" to customers.  Sometimes hardware simply fails.

-New MacTech Pro events and cities have been announced!
http://pro.mactech.com/go/ccp/

-Sam has follow up on using Daylite with his business and finds some functionality that he wasn't aware of
http://www.daylitemac.com

-CCP Theater!  Jerry and Joe role play what you might encounter with new client calls

-Joe gives us an update on his new/used 2015 MacBook Pro.  He recounts an issue where the battery reports that it needs to be serviced and then changes to a "good" condition.  He reports an uptime of 31 – nay, 33 days. Joe and Sam remark that they don't recall having had more than 10 days of uptime with their MacBook Pro 2016 models, although Sam has had better stability lately.

-Joe also follows up about having used Migration Assistant to switch to his new, used (and apparently slightly bruised) MacBook Pro 15-inch 2015, and notes that Safari Extensions needed to be reinstalled, surprisingly. But at least VPN configurations were not an issue, unlike back in the days of Mavericks (and Yosemite too?)

-Jerry is very excited about an iOS app called Drafts, a note taking app with impressive functionality.  Drafts is $4.99 in the App Store
https://agiletortoise.com/drafts/

244: Victory From The Jaws Of Defeat

Topics:

-This week we are proud to be sponsored by FLEXdesk, an offering from our friends at Rooted Consulting.  FLEXdesk - Help Desk support that grows with you

-Sam shares a story where a client has some confusion with hardware

-Social media and clients.  Do they mix? 

-Joe shares a story about a client calling and saying the keyboards were not working at their retail store so they couldn't check out customers. We walked through looking for a battery compartment or a way to plug them in, but they didn't seem to have any way to change batteries or charge them. Then Joe remembered that the Logitech keyboards are solar powered and wonders if something changed in the environment. Client said they recently replaced all the lights with energy efficient LEDs! Apparently the new LED lights are so efficient, they don't have any spare light to charge the keyboards (or more likely, they aren't the right wavelength of light to work with the solar panels).

-Sam talks about voice recognition when meeting someone in person

-After upgrading a hard drive on a 27" iMac, Sam realizes he needed to fix the hinge.  He found an excellent option from The Mac Hack. As it turns out, a site that Joe knows well.

-Joe investigates a situation where sent mail doesn't show in the client's Sent mailbox. Mail.app was configured to BCC the client on all emails, and Gmail was deleting the copy from his Sent when the copy in the Inbox was deleted.

-Sam recounts being at JFK Airport in New York City when the emergency alert system was used to warn of a water main break in the next terminal and wonders if iBeacon was used to alert only people in the airport.

-We discuss the recent false alarm in Hawaii which also used the emergency alert system, and while Joe can't help but introduce a conspiratorial angle, it was likely due to bad design. Perhaps Heinlein's Razor (or Hanlon's Razor) – "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" – applies here.

-followup on Episode 236: MacBook Pro - Turn Back Time re: Temp user can not be deleted. Joe noticed that when migrating to a clean install of 10.13.2, Migration Assistant prompts to re-enter some users' passwords. For non-admin users, it changes passwords to a temporary password (looks like one generated by Keychain Assistant) and then prompts the user to change it upon first login. Could this be related to the root login issue? And/or to Joe’s Temp user issue? Note the difference in behavior when using Reset Password vs. Change Password. Joe bets that it's related to the method of storing the password hash – maybe there’s a less secure format for legacy accounts with longstanding passwords, which Apple has now deprecated?

243: Star Belly & Plain Belly Sneetches

Topics:

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!

-Jerry humbly shares a story of formatting the wrong drive while preparing new external installers and things to watch out for in APFS volumes when booted from HFS+

-Joe almost attempted a migration to Sierra from High Sierra when setting up Judy's new computer

-Jerry compares HFS+ to APFS issues to the Dr. Seuss Sneetches

-Sam shares his latest experience with Daylite and how he has seen the power of the product.  Our own Jerry Zigmont can help!
http://www.daylitemac.com

-This leads into a further conversation about Daylite as a product and methods of integration

-Joe has frustrations about Microsoft's auto update.  It provides a perfect opportunity to discuss our friends at Addigy

-Jerry talks about some of his non-public facing websites to try and make things easier for his clients.  But as it turns out, it ends up creating frustration.

-The group compares MSP models and how they all operate slightly differently

-Joe was listening to the mac catalog and has some followup from episode 231: “Grant BigLanik Easy Access” re: Amazon Gift Cards: very annoying, resulted in having to use AirPlane Mode to finish a recipe for Curried Butternut Squash and Pear Soup on AllRecipes.com. (Joe misstated this as SimplyRecipes.com in the podcast. The Editor regrets the mistake.)
 

242: Goals For 2018 With Weldon Dodd of Rewind Tech - Denver, CO

Topics:

Weldon Dodd of Rewind Technology joins us for another episode
https://rewindtech.com

-Weldon asks the crew about New Year's resolutions and the conversation immediately delves into a discussion on Wi-Fi

-Eero is a recommendation Weldon has been using in a lot of residential environments.  Joe & Jerry have similar positive experiences:
https://eero.com

-Cisco Meraki is what Rewind Tech usually turns to for continued management of a network:
https://meraki.cisco.com

-Weldon discusses his 1, 3, 5, 7 plan (Software - every year, endpoint equipment (laptops) - 3, servers - 5 years, networking equipment - 7 years)

-Sam is starting to evaluate Daylite as a CRM and sees many possibilities for use within his organization.  Still, the discussion of a good old fashioned spreadsheet comes about.
https://daylitemac.com

-Weldon discusses the future of his training and MSP business as well as his role within the organization

-2018 goals for Weldon: creating and utilizing custom DEP deployment solutions since the future of imaging is changing. Ultimately he wants a great experience for the customer.  Here are some of the tools that he is looking into:

The ability to create macOS packages to deploy user accounts
https://github.com/gregneagle/pycreateuserpkg

DEP deployment tools:
https://github.com/Shufflepuck/SplashBuddy 
https://gitlab.com/Mactroll/DEPNotify
https://github.com/erikng/installapplications

-Tim Perfitt from Two Canoes discusses acquiring a new iMac Pro and the changes that come with it: https://twocanoes.com/secureboot-imac-pro/

-Another great resource mentioned from Scripting OS X called NetInstall Is Dead, Too: https://scriptingosx.com/2017/12/netinstall-is-dead-too/

-Weldon takes a few moments and acknowledges the fellow members of the Mac community

-Have a great 2018!

241: "Not Dead Yet" With Weldon Dodd of Rewind Tech - Denver, CO

Topics:

-To start the new year, we are very pleased to be joined on our first live show of 2018 by Weldon Dodd of Rewind Technology in Denver, CO.  Weldon hangs with the crew as another host in case Sam goes missing again.
https://rewindtech.com

-Some things never change, the old HCS land grab jokes are in full swing

-Joe discusses the first zero day exploit of 2018, actually launched via tweet on New Year's Eve. Check out the IOHIDeous narrative on GitHub, kind of interesting! The vulnerability exists in a process called IOHIDUserClient which the macOS limits to having only a single instance at any given time, which happens to be spawned by WindowServer. So in order to exploit the vulnerability, we need to kill the WindowServer process. But terminating it requires admin privileges and essentially reboots the GUI, so this is not a viable mode of exploitation. But it turns out that by logging out the user, WindowServer releases its IOHIDUserClient temporarily, giving the exploit enough time to spawn its own instance of IOHIDUserClient and leverage it to compromise the system. The exploit can use "launchctl reboot logout" which does not display a warning dialog. The exploit can also use an AppleScript command to send loginwindow an event called "AppleEventReallyLogOut" (osascript -e 'tell application "loginwindow" to «event aevtrlgo»'), and loginwindow apparently doesn't care who sent the event, but it does display a dialog box as if the user selected "Log Out" from the Apple menu.

-Jerry wonders if this will be on the CCP test

-Sam recalls a story working after hours at a client when the alarm goes off

-Weldon shares his story of a Promise RAID gone wrong. Friends don't let clients pull drives out of RAID drive bays.  It also leads to a further discussion about how to handle RAID solutions and future expansion.

-A handy virtualization app for Synology, which Sam has used in conjunction with CrashPlan, is Docker: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/docker

-Jerry is busy building Minecraft worlds on Synology. He ends up needing a volume formatted as Btrfs.  Read more here: https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/Btrfs

-Time Machine and Synology has had a spotty past

-Sam discusses a Wi-Fi upgrade in NYC and replaced aging equipment with Ubiquiti Unifi. He also has some advice on utilizing a Cloud Key.

-He also mentions a handy workaround to test network settings remotely while still needing to reconnect to the remote computer.  Joe recalls a similar solution for another problem.

-Jerry talks about the Unifi In Wall units that he has set up recently: https://inwall.ubnt.com

Thanks as always to our Patreon sponsors!

Listen to the outtakes and learn the origin of this picture!

240: From The Cutting Room Floor

TOPICS:

- Time Machine and its network-equipped brother, Time Capsule, are superb innovations. They make backup seamless, invisible and easy. They’re also slow. Really slow. I’ve had to wait before I put my MacBook Pro to sleep sometimes while a backup finishes and, of course, the initial backup can literally take days.

Here’s how to fix that.

Open a Terminal window, which you’ll find in the Utilities folder within the Applications list, and paste in the following, typing your login password when prompted:

sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0
This command prevents Time Machine’s backup process assuming a low CPU priority, allowing backups to complete insanely quickly. In fact, you’ll see MB and GBs tick past on the Time Capsule progress display in a second-by-second fashion (provided your Mac isn’t very busy with some other task).
http://www.mackungfu.org/massively-speed-up-time-capsule-time-machine-backups

- Karaoke Style With Taylor Boyko

- Running With Adam Engst

Adam C. Engst is the publisher of TidBITS, one of the oldest and most-respected Internet-based newsletters, distributed weekly to tens of thousands of readers. He has written numerous technical books, including the best-selling Internet Starter Kit series, and many magazine articles - thanks to Contributing Editor positions at MacUser, MacWEEK, and Macworld. His innovations include the creation of the first advertising program to support an Internet publication in 1992, the first flat-rate accounts for graphical Internet access in 1993 (with Northwest Nexus for Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh), and the highly successful Take Control electronic book series. In addition, he has collaborated on several Internet educational videos and has appeared on a variety of internationally broadcast television and radio programs. His indefatigable support of the Macintosh community and commitment to helping individuals has resulted in numerous awards and recognition at the highest levels. In the annual MDJ Power 25 survey of industry insiders, he ranked as the second (2000), third (2001, 2002), fourth (2003), fifth (2004), and third (2005/2006) most influential person in the Macintosh industry. He has also been included on the MacTech 25 list of influential people in the Macintosh technical community for both 2006 and 2007, and he was named one of MacDirectory's top ten visionaries. And how many industry figures can boast of being turned into an action figure?

Will O'Neal, founder and president of both Mid-Atlantic and Metro-Atlanta Computer Solutions, has been supporting Macintosh for nearly twenty years. He began his career in 1989 operating Linotronic Typesetters for Darby Graphics and worked his way into technical support after becoming an expert with early versions of page layouts, image editing applications and font management issues. He started MACS in 2002. Since then, the company has grown from just Will to twelve Apple enthusiasts, including six Apple Certified outside technicians. Will holds the title of Apple Certified Technical Coordinator, and he regularly attends classes around the world to stay on top of the latest hardware, software and solutions for business of all types and sizes. Because of Will’s vast experience and desire to stay current on ‘all things Apple’, he is also the Lead Technical Advisor for MACS. He has a passion for providing exceptional service and solutions to his customers. 

239: Joe's Super Secret Password - PSIMacRules!

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:

When The Beatles Gave Fans A 'Crimble’ Present
https://www.npr.org/2014/12/21/372257350/when-the-beatles-gave-fans-a-crimble-present

The Kim Komando Show ® and all material pertaining thereto is a Registered Trademark / Servicemark: No. 2,281,044. America's Digital Goddess
https://www.komando.com

Logo (programming language)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)

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!