Remotely gathering sysdiagnose files and uploading them to S3

One of the challenges for helpdesks with folks now working remotely instead of in offices has been that it’s now harder to gather logs from user’s Macs. A particular challenge for those folks working with AppleCare Enterprise Support has been with regards to requests for sysdiagnose logfiles.

The sysdiagnose tool is used for gathering a large amount of diagnostic files and logging, but the resulting output file is often a few hundred megabytes in size. This is usually too large to email, so alternate arrangements have to be made to get it off of the Mac in question and upload it to a location where the person needing the logs can retrieve them.

After needing to gather sysdiagnose files a few times, I’ve developed a scripted solution which does the following:

• Collects a sysdiagnose file.
• Creates a read-only compressed disk image containing the sysdiagnose file.
• Uploads the compressed disk image to a specified S3 bucket in Amazon Web Services.
• Cleans up the directories and files created by the script.

For more details, please see below the jump.

“Getting Started with Amazon Web Services” encore presentation at MacSysAdmin 2020

The MacSysAdmin conference, like many conferences in 2020, has moved to an online format for this year. The MacSysAdmin 2020 organizers have also decided to have both sessions that are new for the 2020 conference as well as give an encore performance for sessions given at past MacSysAdmin conferences.

I was pleased to see that my “Getting Started with Amazon Web Services” session from MacSysAdmin 2018 made the cut for MacSysAdmin 2020. For those interested, my session will be available for viewing this Friday, October 9th.