xcreds 2 is released tomorrow! email blast queued and product page updated and ready to be published. so much goodness. We have a new open source model to support (and get support) for our OSS software.

Starting with XCreds 2, you can support based on number of support incidences rather than number of clients. There will be 2 tiers: $999 and $4999 (per year).

i think apple just made an MDM provider play. 🍿 t-mobile.com/news/business/… add to existing lines and free until the end of 2022.

New arduino board with USB-PD arrives today! Hope to learn a lot and perhaps get it to put an M1 mac into DFU mode programatically. It has FUSB302 onboard and a ATmega32U4!

crowdsupply.com/ryan-ma/pd-mic… considering building it into a knitted hat. LED light, bluetooth headphones and put mac into DFU mode.

current project: trying to figure out how MFI limits ios access to devices. with usb-c ipads, 3rd party devices don't generally work if they require their own app. however, i have gotten a few to work with a lightning to USB-C adapter but most adapters don't work. it got even weirder when introducing a hub. one of my customers wanted to have a 3rd party device (lightning) connected to an usb-c ipad but also power at the same time.

Been doing some work on our signing service. You can now have a signed certificate in macOS, iOS, or iPadOS with the private key in the secure enclave on those devices. Here is a video that shows how it works.

dropbox.com/s/dgj0qs2mw16l… It works like this: You authenticate to your IDP (like okta) from in the app. The app creates a private key in the secure enclave protected by fingerprint/faceid and generates a signing request. This is passed to our service and a certificate is generated and passed back.

🧵 I am far down the rabbit hole with USB-C, MFI,lighting and smart card readers. Let me explain. The newest iPads have a USB-C connector. There is a lot of confusion around if/what USB-C peripherals are supported. You can connect an Ethernet dongle and that works. Or a keyboard. Or a the camera kit. But not a usb-c smart card reader. Or a yubikey in PIV mode.

Some very interesting findings for installing macOS on an M1 today by @RandomApps. As you may know, we lost the ability to run startosinstall in recovery on an M1. It turns out you can get back almost all the automation with a couple of carefully placed files. #macadmins Turns out that the trick is getting the macOS installer to think it is migrate / install versus a fresh installation so that it will leave the first boot installers and scripts in place. Here is how it works:

In prep for the MDS 2 release, I created some new videos and postings for the new MDM service in MDS. MDS 2 opens the door to doing some pretty cool setups. You can now do user enrolled MDM as well as Device Enrollment via Apple Business Manager and Apple School Manager.

So it looks like this happened on the way to the current macOS imaging state we are in:

(thread)

1. Firmware updates were bundle with OS updates

2. Monolithic imaging doesn’t run the OS installer, so firmware updates don’t get applied. 3. Monolithic imaging of the same OS version doesn’t require firmware updates (since that same installer would have applied the firmware updates previously). Hence the “reinstall macOS” caveat.

#macadmins #macimaging