Home > Casper, Mac administration, Mac OS X, Scripting > Automatically suppressing the iCloud and Diagnostics pop-up windows with Casper

Automatically suppressing the iCloud and Diagnostics pop-up windows with Casper

When I updated to 10.10.1 yesterday, as part of the restart process I noticed that I was seeing the Diagnostics pop-up window appear on login.

I had previously suppressed this window as part of setting up this machine, but it looks like the LastSeenBuddyBuildVersion value in /Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SetupAssistant.plist had the build number for 10.10.0 stored and it needed to be updated with the build number of 10.10.1 in order to suppress the Diagnostics pop-up window again.

Fortunately, this can be addressed by setting up an automated run of my iCloud / Diagnostics suppression script with Casper. This should automatically update the LastSeenBuddyBuildVersion value in /Users/username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SetupAssistant.plist with the build number for the current version of 10.10.x. For more details, see below the jump.

To help automate this process, I first added the iCloud / Diagnostics suppression script to my Casper server.

Screen Shot 2014-11-18 at 9.33.53 AM

Screen Shot 2014-11-18 at 9.34.03 AM

After adding the script, I set up a Casper policy that automatically runs this script at startup.

To help ensure that this script also runs when the Mac cannot contact my Casper server, I’ve set Execution Frequency to Ongoing, as that allows me to select the Make Available Offline option.

Screen Shot 2014-11-18 at 9.34.42 AM

Screen Shot 2014-11-18 at 9.34.54 AM

The policy is scoped to a smart group that contains only 10.10.x Macs.

Screen Shot 2014-11-18 at 9.35.03 AM

  1. Marc
    November 19, 2014 at 7:59 am

    FYI there are two com.apple.SetupAssistant.plists with different content.

    one in /Library/Prefs.. and one in ~/Library/Prefs..

    changing the LastSeenBuddyBuildVersion and LastSeenCloudProductVersion values seems not to cause the dialog to pop up.

  2. Josh Whitver
    November 19, 2014 at 9:19 pm

    The video you’ve linked is “private” so we can’t see it. 😦

    • November 19, 2014 at 9:26 pm

      Whoops. Fixed, please try it again.

  3. Marc
    November 21, 2014 at 12:44 pm

    it’s not working.
    I try to force the diagnostic setup for testing purposes. I tried to set or remove all build and version values in com.apple.SetupAssistant.plist and reboot the system, it will still not ask for diagnostic setup.

  4. Gwen
    January 23, 2015 at 9:21 pm

    I noticed that you have added /usr/bin/ before your defaults write commands. This was not there in the 10.9 script. Is it required for 10.10? What is the difference/benefit? Thanks.

  5. May 29, 2015 at 5:48 pm

    I used this script to stop these diagnostic screens via Offset’s every-boot functionality. Working great so far!

  6. kheenan halvorson
    August 20, 2015 at 12:58 pm

    i have this but doesnt prevent the sign in with apple id screen, is it suppose to be muting this?

  7. Jeremy
    January 21, 2016 at 6:03 pm

    I have been using this in our casper deployment but it now doesn’t work with 10.11, is there another version of this I haven’t found?

    • Paul
      July 1, 2016 at 6:42 pm

      My understanding is that in 10.11 Sips prevents us from modifying anything in /System. Therefore we can’t modify, i used rtrouton’s config profile to suppress this. But it requires the system to be rebooted for it to work.

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