Creating a sysdiagnose file using Activity Monitor

The sysdiagnose tool is used for gathering a large amount of diagnostic files and logging, and it’s often very useful when it comes to figuring out why a problem is happening. However, it can sometimes be challenging to get a sysdiagnose-generated file from someone who is not comfortable with using the Terminal as the usual method for generating a sysdiagnose file involves opening the Terminal and running commands there.

Fortunately, there’s also a way to generate a sysdiagnose file using Activity Monitor. This may be an alternate way to help get you the desired sysdiagnose file from someone who normally wouldn’t ever use the Terminal on macOS. For more details, please see below the jump.

Granting Volume Owner status on Apple Silicon Macs

macOS on Apple Silicon Macs includes a concept known as volume ownership. You must be a volume owner to perform the following tasks on an Apple Silicon Mac:

• Make changes to startup security policy for a specific install of macOS.*
• Be able to authorize the installation of macOS software updates or macOS upgrades.
• Authorize running Erase All Contents and Settings.

* There may be multiple installations of macOS on one Apple Silicon Mac; each macOS install would have their own startup security policy.

For more information on volume ownership, please see Apple’s Platform Deployment article linked below:

https://support.apple.com/guide/deployment/use-secure-and-bootstrap-tokens-dep24dbdcf9e/web (see the Volume ownership section.)

How do you get volume ownership though? It turns out that Apple has this currently set up on macOS as a two-fer deal: If an account account has Secure Token, it is also granted volume ownership. For more details, please see below the jump.

Setting a user account to automatically log in using sysadminctl on macOS Ventura

On macOS, it’s possible to set an account to automatically log in. However, up until macOS Ventura, there hasn’t been an Apple command line tool available which will do the following:

• Set the desired account to automatically log in
• Create the /etc/kcpassword file

Setting the desired account to log in could be accomplished by running the following command with root privileges:

/usr/bin/defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow autoLoginUser -string username_goes_here

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The hard part was correctly creating the /etc/kcpassword file, which stores an obfuscated copy of the password used by the account which is being set for auto-login. Without that file properly created and available in the specified location, the automatic login process would fail. For those interested in how the kcpassword file is set up, please see the link below:

https://www.offsec.com/offsec/in-the-hunt-for-the-auto-login-setup-process/

There have been several tools built by the community which successfully create the kcpassword file, but Apple themselves hadn’t provided a way to do this in macOS Monterey or earlier, outside of using the GUI for Users & Groups in System Preferences.

As of macOS Ventura, the sysadminctl command line tool has been updated with functionality to enable and disable auto-login for specified accounts. For more details, please see below the jump.

Backing up Der Flounder Revisited Once Again

Eleven years ago, I wrote a post on how I back up this blog. Overall, the reasons I’m backing up haven’t changed:

• I like this blog and don’t want to see it or its data disappear because of data loss
• WordPress.com’s free hosting doesn’t provide me with an automated backup method.

Two years ago, I wrote another post on how I needed to switch from hosting on a Mac to now hosting on a Raspberry Pi. The overall methodology hadn’t changed, I was creating a nightly mirror using HTTrack. This worked fine until the latest move to a new host in February 2023, where HTTrack was failing for me because the Raspberry Pi was running headless without a connected display and HTTrack was having problems with trying to launch a headless browser. After an hour of futzing with it, I moved to using wget. The wget tool has a number of handy options for mirroring websites, including the following:

• –mirror: Makes the download recursive, with recursive browsing and infinite recursion depth.
• –convert-links: Convert all the links to relative, so it will be suitable for offline viewing.
• –adjust-extension: Adds suitable filename extensions to filenames, (html, css, etc.) depending on their content-type.

Based on my research, using wget would be a decent replacement for what I had been doing with HTTrack and wouldn’t have the problems I was seeing with HTTrack not being able to launch a headless browser session. For those wanting to know more, please see below the jump.