Weekly News Summary for Admins — 2020-05-29

Update week, part 2. macOS Catalina 10.15.5 dropped this week. Among many other changes, it contains an important change to softwareupdate --ignore which seriously affects MacAdmins.

As always, many thanks to those who are providing better update information than Apple. Especially: Mr Macintosh and Howard Oakley.

The conference schedule has been seriously affected by the pandemic. The silver lining here is that with all the conferences. Thanks to the MacDeployment YYC twitter post we have a virtual conference line up:

I will be presenting at at least two of these: a Campfire Session on June 11 on ‘Moving to zsh’ and ‘Practical Scripting’ at MacSysAdmin Online.

MacAD.UK is, as of now, still scheduled to occur in person on November 3 and 4.

If you would rather get the weekly newsletter by email, you can subscribe to the Scripting OS X Weekly Newsletter here!! (Same content, delivered to your Inbox once a week.)

macOS Catalina 10.15 and iOS 13 Updates

Update Information

MacAdmins on Twitter

  • William Smith: “A gift to your future self (and others)… Use shortcuts like -s and -v for command options in your daily Terminal work to save you time and keystrokes. But use the full names of command options in your scripts to better explain what you’re doing.”
  • Tim Perfitt: “I wrote a shell script that gets the DEP record if you give it a Mac serial number. Here is what it does: Puts serial into VMWare image config Starts up VM SSH’es into VM and runs command to print DEP record (ssh keys set up prior) shuts down VM runtime is about 30 secs.”
  • Hannes Juutilainen: “If a folder name ends with .noindex it will not be indexed by Spotlight. And if a folder name ends with .nobackup it will not be included in Time Machine backups.”
  • Joel Rennich: “So… you’d like to find out if your IdP vendor supports Apple’s Single Sign On extensions? All SSOEs need to have an Apple App Site Association file hosted at the endpoint URL that the SSOE wants to be authoritative for.” (Thread)
  • Joel Rennich: “The only publicly available Apple SSO Extension that I’m aware of is Microsoft’s MSAL library with their latest Authenticator app from the App Store. Currently in public preview and only on iOS.”
  • Graham Gilbert: ““Major new releases of macOS are no longer hidden when using the softwareupdate(8) command with the --ignore flag” tldr: if you don’t patch, you’re vulnerable. We’re trying to improve your security. Finally something I agree with, well done @apple” (counterpoint)
  • Simon Carlson-Thies (LinkedIn): “Zoom has a seriously odd way of dealing with preferences…” (link for more)

Bugs and Security

Support and HowTos

Scripting and Automation

Updates and Releases

To Listen

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Mac Admin, Consultant, and Author