Profile Manager Issues (server 5.6.1)

[SuperCompu2]

Hi All,

I recently updated my macOS Server installation to 5.6.1, and I've noticed some of my managed profiles have been misbehaving.

- I have two network shares that are mapped as login items (SMB).
- Those two shares are added as persistent dock items once mapped.

When I went to go modify a value in the profile (custom setting, not the regular Dock payload), the entirety of the dock broke, including the addition of Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which aren't even on my machine (manifested as three '?' in the center of the dock). I now have a seemingly "stock" arrangement of icons you'd get as a brand new profile, with all my additions removed, and network drives are gone.

Puzzled by this, I decided to create a new Dock payload from the standard list, and once pushed out, examine the plist to see how the drives are mapped. To my surprise, the new plist has no reference to the folder/drive being added to the dock, despite appearing in the dock. It seems the configuration placing the folder in the dock is stored elsewhere, now.

Has anyone else had this problem? I had a nicely configured dock with network shares working across 10.11, 10.12 and 10.13 as of this morning, and now it is broken across all three OS revisions, and I have no idea how to fix it!

(Luckily this is all in a test environment, so nothing broke in prod).

Any help appreciated!

 

[SuperCompu2]

[Follow Up in case others ever have this issue]

I think I figured out what the issue was:

In my previous custom plist file, I had many things defined that the OS was ignoring before (tile size, mod-count, trash-full, etc)

Once I pared it down to just "persistent-others" and defined the path for the drives, it seems to be mostly behaving again. A colleague logged into our 10.12 test machine and got a question mark for one drive, while the other mapped fine, so there are still some bugs to work out. 10.11 and 10.13 seem to be working alright.

I know most people are using JAMF and other 3rd party programs for this sort of thing, but I'm trying to use the built-in stuff as long as I can!

 

[hobowankenobi]

Thanks for the info.

FWIW, after years of trial and error (and bugs) I lean towards keeping profiles as simple and modular as possible. Both to troubleshoot and update.

I don't think Profiles are going away, no matter what MDM folks use.

Oh, and if you don't use it, check out Dock Master.

 

[DJLC]

+1 for paring down your profiles. Profile Manager and even some third-party MDMs can get confused when you have too much stuff in there. We had this strange issue where a certain combination of LoginWindow settings caused AD user accounts to immediately log out upon login; separating those into different profiles fixed it right up.

 

[SuperCompu2]

+1 for paring down your profiles. Profile Manager and even some third-party MDMs can get confused when you have too much stuff in there. We had this strange issue where a certain combination of LoginWindow settings caused AD user accounts to immediately log out upon login; separating those into different profiles fixed it right up.

Initially, my thought process was to remove things until something broke, then leave it as is, but I guess the older version was just ignoring the nonsense, where the newer version of Server doesn't tolerate it well.

It was a valuable lesson to learn, and should help in other areas, too. I already have features pretty well segregated into groups (network settings, AD bind, dock settings, etc), but the Dock was the only profile I had written myself. All the others had been built out through the Configuration Manager settings.