Previously, I covered how to Programmatically Obtain Recent Wi-Fi Networks On A Mac. But, here I’m gonna’ go a step further and look at how to extract the password for a network as well. The two are stored in different locations. The recent networks are in the /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences defaults domain. If you pull one of those, then you can use the security command to extract the password itself. security find-generic-password -ga "Krypted Home" The output is as follows, showing everything that is tracked about this network in the keychain. keychain: "/Library/Keychains/System.keychain" class: "genp" attributes: 0x00000007 <blob>="Krypted Home" 0x00000008 <blob>=<NULL> "acct"<blob>="Krypted Home" "cdat"<timedate>=0x32303135313230373135313731375A00 "20151207151717Z\000" "crtr"<uint32>=<NULL> "cusi"<sint32>=<NULL> "desc"<blob>="AirPort network password" "gena"<blob>=<NULL> "icmt"<blob>=<NULL> "invi"<sint32>=<NULL> "mdat"<timedate>=0x32303135313230373135313731375A00 "20151207151717Z\000"…
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10.11.2 and iOS 9.2 Available
The last couple of days have resulted in a lot of bug fixes from our friends at Apple. OS X 10.11.2 and iOS 9.2 are available. Hope you have a caching server right about now! The 10.11.2 update notes: The OS X El Capitan 10.11.2 update improves the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, and is recommended for all users. This update: Improves Wi-Fi reliability Improves the reliability of Handoff and AirDrop Fixes an issue that may cause Bluetooth devices to disconnect Fixes an issue that prevented Mail from deleting messages in an offline Exchange account Fixes an issue that prevented importing photos from an iPhone to a Mac…
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The Second Edition of our Enterprise Mac Administrators Guide Now Shipping
My 14th book, The second edition of the Mac Administrator’s Guide is now shipping. This was a big, big rewrite, given the fact that the first edition was before the App Store, Gatekeeper, and many, many other technologies. You can buy this book here! Also, huge congrats to Bill Smith, for publishing his first book, and most notably for doing so much amazing work on this book! Finally, we’re editing the second and third books I did this past summer right now, so look out for those announcements shortly!
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Use The jamfHelper Binary To Display Messages In OS X
The jamfHelper binary is used to deploy an alert to client computers that are enrolled in the JSS. This can be a full screen alert with headings, icons, text, and countdowns. This could also just be a small utility window that informs a user that something was installed. You can do similar tasks with push notifications, but I find that a lot of times an APNs update will disappear before someone can click on it. Therefore, we can use the jamfHelper binary to send alert screens in OS X. We’ll go through a couple of minor examples here. The first is to send a window called KRYPTED that is full screen, with test as the…
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Is Imaging Dead In OS X?
I love answering a question with a question. Is asr still in OS X? Is NetInstall still in OS X Server? Can OS X still NetBoot? Does System Image Utility still work? The answer to all of these is yes. Therefore, the answer to “Is imaging dead” is clearly no. Is it on its way out, maybe. Debatable. Is it changing? Of course. When does Apple not evolve? What have we seen recently? Well, the rhetoric would point to the fact that imaging is dying. That seems clear. And this is slowly coming out of people at Apple. The word imaging is becoming a bad thing. But, as a customer…
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Enable And Disable Permissions On Volumes Using A Script
Someone hands you a USB drive. You put it in your computer and you can’t access anything on it. You are running an imaging lab and you want to backup or troubleshoot a device before you re-image it, but you can’t access certain files. Obviously, you can sudo. But, you can also simply disable permissions on that volume (which, like getting someone to make you a sandwich, requires sudo of course). The command used to enable and disable permissions on a volume is vsdbutil, located at /usr/sbin/vsdbutil. And there’s a LaunchDaemon at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.vsdbutil.plist that interacts with diskarbitrationd so that when a volume is mounted, it is marked as having permissions…
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No git Commit Message #tomhardy
Click for lightning. Merge-your-damn-self. But if you commit with a well written message (and not just a period to get past a sanity check), I’m happy. Tom Hardy likes it when you tell me wtf. via GIPHY
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Recruiting Good Mac Talent
When I was doing a lot of hiring, the pool of Mac Admins was smaller. And it was in a way easier for me to recruit people, because I knew a lot of them. As the pool has grown and a lot of the talent has matured, keeping your finger on the pulse of the hiring market around Apple has become much more challenging. Also, I’ve recruited far more developers and marketing professionals than Apple engineers in the past couple of years. But, there are still a number of places that you can look to find good Mac and iOS engineers looking for a gig. Here’s a quick and dirty…
- 318, Apps, Articles and Books, Bushel, Business, certifications, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment, Microsoft Exchange Server, Minneapolis
My 3,000th Post On Krypted
This is my 3,000th post on Krypted.com. The past 3,000 posts have primarily been about OS X Server, Mac automation, Mac deployment, scripting, iOS deployments, troubleshooting, Xsan, Windows Servers, Exchange Server, Powershell, security, and other technical things that I have done in my career. I started the site in response to a request from my first publisher. But it took on a mind of its own. And I’m happy with the way it’s turned out. My life has changed a lot over these past 11 years. I got married and then I got divorced. I now have a wonderful daughter. I became a partner and the Chief Technology Officer of 318 and helped to shape it into…
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Programmatically Obtain Recent Wi-Fi Networks On A Mac
When you join a wireless network on a Mac, the information for that network is cached into the com.apple.airport.preferences property list. You can access this information using the following command, constraining output to the LastConnected field and the next 7 lines: defaults read /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences | grep LastConnected -A 7