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Generating Manual Manifests for Jamf PreStage Enrollment Packages

Posted on 11th June 2020

It has been a long time coming that in Jamf and Apple land, that we can pre-install packages to the Mac during the enrollment process (DEP, now called Apple Device Enrollment). In our environment, we are switching from the old, bind to the AD domain method and allow password syncs to break even while using Nomad era, to the new (re-branded Nomad) Jamf Connect (See: https://www.jamf.com/products/jamf-connect/). Naturally, we would like to reply the Jamf Connect Login before anything else and use it’s Notify script to streamline the install progress and provide the user information as the installs complete.

The specific error that you see under the Management Commands for the specific computer you are trying to enroll is “No manifest could be created for the package.”

Jamf Pro 10.19-10.21 have an issue that seems related to PI-007954 where Jamf Admin is not automatically calculating the size of the package and creating a correct manifest for it. The manifest is required in order for macOS to install the packages defined in PreStage Enrollments. Since this does not get generated automatically correctly, we must manually build one and upload it for each package we are going to use during the PreStage Enrollment.

There was not much information about this in the community forums on Jamf Nation, nor from Jamf themselves. After talking to support, here is what you need to do:

0

iPhone 8 (Plus) and iPhone X – Opinion

Posted on 13th September 2017

I have not spent much time in the consumer end of the technology market in the last few years due to my enterprise role I currently have, but did manage to follow the developments leading to the release of Apple’s new products yesterday.

I still remember 10 years ago. I was living in New York City, and Apple had announced that they were making a smart phone. Even with the success of the classic ipod (not so classic at the time), it was hard to imagine what the new phone would look like. I remember people posting online (pre-reddit?) mockups of what it would look like. Basically, it was suppose to look like an iPod with a slightly bigger screen and all the other things needed to make it a phone. Various mockups can be found here. The mockup I remember the most, is the third one; the Blackberry look alike.

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Insignia NS-PCY5BMA Bluetooth 4.0, Macintosh Yosemite 10.10.2, and Handoff

Posted on 19th May 2015

Insignia NS-PCY5BMAWith the release of Yosemite and iOS 8.1, came a new way to connect the many Apple devices that one person can have. This method known as Continuity and Handoff allows a phone call to be answered on a Macintosh computer and transferred to an iPhone along with access to continuing to edit an email from one device to another. These are just a couple of examples of Apple’s new feature set. See Apple’s explanation here.

The feature is designed to work only with newer model Macs and can leave some of us, including Hackintoshers, out of the mix. The requirements call for Bluetooth 4.0 and certain WiFi chipsets to natively enable the feature. Some work from the community has given us the “Continuity Activation Enabler” for older Macs and can even work for some Hackintoshes that have a Bluetooth 4.0 adaptor that is natively support Out of the Box in Yosemite. A cheap Bluetooth adaptor can be found in a lot of places online, but local availability of a solution can be limited.

Best Buy sells at least one Bluetooth 4.0 dongle under their in-house brand Insignia model NS-PCY5BMA. Luckily for us, it sports the Broadcom BCM20702A0 chipset which OS X Yosemite supports, but just not in the Insignia flavor. To enable Handoff, we must get a working Bluetooth 4.0 adaptor at the start. The Insignia one can be used after it is enabled in OS X. What we will look at today is how to get OS X to recognize this adaptor, and then activate the Handoff feature. This guide should work for any adaptor that has the BCM20702A0, but is not recognized under the Bluetooth section in the System Information window.

2

Fix iMessage on Yosemite

Posted on 17th March 2015

Apple-logoFirst off, Happy St. Patricks Day!

It has been a question that many Hackintoshers have been trying to solve since the release of the Yosemite betas last year. How do we get iMessages to work? Many have tried and many have failed. What has seemed to lack is a good comprehensive guide covering a wide range of scenarios.

This guide over at Tonymacx86 is a pretty detailed resources and should help you get your setup going. You are best to use the Clover Bootloader as is seems to handle the manual values as well as NVRAM much better then Chimera/Chameleon. I will note the chapter I followed for each setting in my setup.

Anytime I would try to sign in to Messages, I would get the “An error occurred during activation. Try again.” message. This was good news for me since I just had to make sure Clover had the right serial numbers and so on. Some situations will still require you to call in to Apple to have them whitelist your serial and some other values. For my situation, all I needed to make sure I had valid was:

  • Product Name (SMBIOS and found one matching my hardware using MacTracker) Chapter 4.2
  • Serial Number (Generating one in Clover Configurator and verifying at Apple Selfsolve) Chapter 4.1
  • SmUUID (Generating a random one using uuidgen in the terminal even to know my board did not exhibit the Sid bug) Chapter 5
  • ROM (Using MAC Address of my ethernet minus the colons) Chapter 7.1
  • MLB (Serial number that I generated plus 5 random alpha/numeric characters) Chapter 7.1

I also made sure that all of my configs for iMessage and iCloud were deleted prior to doing anything as to make sure I started as fresh as possible. (Chapter 3.3)

Note on the SmUUID. It is better to generate a unique SmUUID and not assume that your motherboards will work with Apple’s servers. Just run uuidgen from the terminal 4 or 5 times and use that value in Clover Configurator. Also make sure, as is detailed in chapter 3.2, that your ethernet and wifi are labeled as enX and showing as Built-In for this to work right.

Once all of these were set up with correct values, I did need to change my Apple ID password. Once reset, I was able to login and send/receive iMessages once again. Once you have correct values, you will want to always use these with your particular motherboard/cpu combination as to not blacklist that system in the future as long as Apple does not change their verification process again.

And finally, a big shout out to jaymonkey who has spent countless hours keeping his guide up to date. Without his collection of information, iMessages would not be functioning on Yosemite Hackintoshes.