I had the honor of presenting at the University of Utah’s May 2021 MacAdmins Meeting this week.
The slides and video are already up – check them out here!
For a while now, I’ve been meaning to post about how I’m bootstrapping our Macs using Workspace ONE UEM and several open source tools. This will be a multi-part series, and will culminate with a presentation at the University of Utah’s MacAdmins meeting for May 2021. I feel that it’d be best to start with some historical context and how bootstrapping has evolved since I joined the industry.
It’s been just over a year since my last post about smart home stuff, and I wanted to write about some of the stuff we’ve changed since then. Here we go!
Update: I’ve since moved on to using LinuxServer.io’s SWAG. You can run SWAG on a Synology NAS (if it supports Docker), but I’m running it in Ubuntu on other hardware. I’ve learned a lot since posting this, but I’m leaving it up in case it’s still helpful to anyone else.
In several previous posts, I detailed how to secure various services with a Let’s Encrypt certificate, installed in DSM. I approached each one individually, figuring out how to link the certificate in a way that each application accepted.
On my post about securing Ubooquity, jcd suggested I use Synology’s built-in reverse proxy server instead (and linked to this tutorial). Honestly, this was the best advice, and I’ve since switched away from the various methods I detailed before. Please check out Graham Leggat’s tutorial – this post isn’t meant to be a retelling, but hopefully adds some useful notes that I learned along the way.
Essentially, here’s how a reverse proxy works: you have a service running inside of your firewall over HTTP (not secured). Here are some of your options for opening that service outside of your network:
A reverse proxy is a separate server, sitting in between your service and the internet, which will encrypt all traffic, seamlessly. When you connect from outside of your firewall, you’ll communicate securely to your reverse proxy, which will then pass along your traffic to your unencrypted applications.
There are many benefits to this approach: this works with nearly every application, requires very little configuration (past the initial setup), allows you to set up memorable URLs without using weird ports, etc.
Some prerequisites:
Now that you’ve got all of that squared away, let’s proceed.
CNAME
application.yourdomain.com
example.synology.me
)HTTPS
application.yourdomain.com
443
HTTP
192.168.1.3
or 127.0.0.1
)80
or 8080
)https://application.yourdomain.com
in a web browser. If you did everything right (and I didn’t miss any steps!), you should be able to load your application and see that the connection is secure. If you click the lock, you should see your wildcard certificate.Going forward, you can do this for multiple applications – and each one can use port 443, so you don’t need to open additional ports outside of your firewall or remember anything more than your unique subdomain for each application.
Ever since I got my MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar, I’ve avoided typing in my password as much as possible. macOS 10.14 and 10.15 added more places in the OS that accept Touch ID, which has been a welcome change. As part of my job, I tend to use the sudo
command quite a bit, and this post from Rich Trouton has been a godsend. Just edit the appropriate file, restart your Terminal session, and you’re all set.
However, with many macOS patches and security updates, /etc/pam.d/sudo
is reset back to defaults. I don’t know why this happens, but it’s quite annoying. After manually applying the change to this file again, I finally decided to script it.
Now, there are a handful of files that can really ruin your day if they become damaged or invalid. This is one of those files. Please proceed with caution, keep good backups, and be prepared to reinstall your OS if things get really messed up. That said, this worked for me on macOS 10.15.5, and will hopefully continue to work for years to come.
Since I use Munki, I decided to build a nopkg file that checks for the appropriate line in /etc/pam.d/sudo
, and inserts it if it’s not present. To download the code, please see my GitHub repository.
Last spring, my fiancée and I bought a house. We lived in an apartment for two years, and experimented with smart home stuff, but wanted to do a bit more with our house. We’ve had enough people ask about our setup that I figured I’d write a blog post.
Just a quick note if you’re following this method to test Apple’s Device Enrollment Program (DEP) with VMs: as of macOS 10.14.3, the hardware must meet the minimum system requirements for macOS 10.14.
With macOS 10.14.0 through 10.14.2, you were able to use serial numbers from Macs that could not run 10.14.x themselves. Since you’re booting VMs, that didn’t really matter. However, as of 10.14.3, the VM will stall while booting, then eventually reboot and stall again.
It’s unfortunate, as older hardware is easier to find – I had a stack of 2011 Mac minis that I kept specifically for VMs.
Update, 2019-09-03: Erik Gomez corrected me: if you create a VM with vfuse, specify the 2011 Mac mini’s serial number, but use Macmini6,2
instead of Macmini5,1
as hw_model
, it’ll boot and let you proceed through DEP. I haven’t tested any other model, but this works great! Thanks, Erik.
Update, 2020-06-11: I’ve changed the code back to a script. Please see the GitHub repo for an explanation and the updated code.
Although the trend is to move away from binding Macs to Active Directory (most commonly using NoMAD), we’re still binding for various reasons:
Originally, we would bind Macs to AD as part of our DeployStudio imaging workflow. Unfortunately, we faced a couple of drawbacks with this approach:
With the help of Graham Gilbert’s tutorial, we were able to move AD binding to Munki. This also gave us an unexpected benefit: in the past, we frequently found that the binding on Macs would randomly break. This was a major issue in the classrooms, where students and faculty would not be able to login to computers and start class. Moving this to Munki with a custom installcheck_script made it “self-healing” – every 1-2 hours, Munki will rebind the Mac, if necessary (or prompt the user to do this through Managed Software Center).
For the past year, there’s been a big push to move to configuration profiles for applying settings. Luckily, you can use the “directory” payload to bind to AD! However, it’s just running dsconfigad in the background anyway, so it’s entirely possible for your Mac’s binding to be broken, but the AD profile to show as successfully installed. The MDM protocol currently has no method of determining if the AD profile should be reinstalled, so Munki is a much more logical choice for deploying this. Armin Briegel’s tutorial was instrumental in assisting with this transition.
Code and usage instructions are available in my GitHub repository.
Update, 2020-06-11: I’m now using Synology’s built-in NGINX-based reverse proxy instead. The instructions below may not work.
Continuing my series on using Docker with a Synology NAS, I now have MunkiReport v3 working – and you can, too!
Some background: MunkiReport is a companion project to Munki (which we set up with Squirrel last week). MunkiReport v3 was released recently, and has a huge list of improvements, thanks to a dedicated group of contributors – especially @bochoven and @mosen, who have overhauled large portions of the project. MunkiReport v3 has some new requirements that weren’t present with v2 – this is the perfect use case for Docker! Docker will handle all of this for us.
Briefly, here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to set up MySQL, Adminer, and MunkiReport using Docker Compose. Then, we’re going to use DSM 6.x’s certificate and reverse proxy support to secure MunkiReport. Let’s go!
/usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f /volume1/docker/docker-compose.yml pull /usr/local/bin/docker-compose -f /volume1/docker/docker-compose.yml up -d
https://yourdomain.com:4444
From there, you can create a MunkiReport installation package (I like using the AutoPkg recipe for this). Push it to your clients, then watch as they check in with sweet, sweet data.
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