Hi,
We're starting to see a number of cases being raised internally about some of our Macs (all on macOS 15.1.1) having intermittent login issues. Our devices are bound to AD and our users have been logging on fine for some time but now we're starting to get issues. Sometimes the logins are fine. Sometimes they take ~10 mins and sometimes they appear to stall completely (waited over 2.5 hours in testing) even on the same device. The login screen appears to freeze (the time doesn't change) and you eventually get the spinning beachball. SSH is still working and you can run a "jamf policy" successfully. "Screen Sharing" reports that the user who has attempted to log into the device is the active user when you connect.
Can anyone share some tips as to how we would start to investigate this sort of issue let alone resolve it???
Thanks
Stuart
Intermittent login issues on macOS 15.1.1
+5
+2Yes, it does reset the file live. So almost certainly better than just deleting it if you’re trying to run something periodically I’d imagine.
If the issue isn’t strictly related to the size of the file, I don’t know if that would actually prevent things necessarily, but I’m currently guessing it is.
Not sure if there is a way you could use that to fix a broken machine. Doesn’t seem like our startup/login scripts or management tools are especially running on the broken ones. People above mentioned being able to ssh into broken ones, but we don’t have that set up. Could maybe run it that way. But no idea if it’d still work and actually reset anything if the machine is already in the broken state.
Next time I see it I will see if it works via SSH. Meantime I will use the command in a script. Thanks for sharing your results here, the sfltool resetbtm command is extremely helpful.
+2I have created a configuration profile to reset BTM on log in for each user. Still testing but so far nothing has gone wrong and it has shown the btm file was modified at log in.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"> <dict> <key>PayloadContent</key> <array> <dict> <key>PayloadType</key> <string>com.apple.launchagent.managed</string> <key>PayloadVersion</key> <integer>1</integer> <key>PayloadIdentifier</key> <string>com.user.resetbtm.launchagent</string> <key>PayloadUUID</key> <string>8E5B3C1D-1111-2222-3333-444455556666</string> <key>PayloadDisplayName</key> <string>Reset BTM LaunchAgent</string> <key>Label</key> <string>com.user.resetbtm</string> <key>ProgramArguments</key> <array> <string>/usr/bin/sfltool</string> <string>resetbtm</string> </array> <key>RunAtLoad</key> <true/> </dict> </array> <key>PayloadDisplayName</key> <string>Reset BTM at Login</string> <key>PayloadIdentifier</key> <string>com.user.resetbtm.profile</string> <key>PayloadRemovalDisallowed</key> <false/> <key>PayloadType</key> <string>Configuration</string> <key>PayloadUUID</key> <string>12345678-AAAA-BBBB-CCCC-1234567890AB</string> <key>PayloadVersion</key> <integer>1</integer> </dict> </plist>
If you are able to test let me know how it goes please.
We are having this same issue too — But only in one of our labs. I can also confirm that SSH’ing in and reseting the BTM appears to resolve the issue.
What I’m taking away from
I exported the btmdump for the problematic lab (though we don’t have a machine currently experiencing the hanging login) and compared it to a machine in a lab with a different configuration which hasn’t had the issue.
This is technically circumstantial, but it seems like the problematic lab both had a high number of “Creative” apps (like Adobe CC, Wacom, Avid, etc.) which tend to have a number of helper application, and it also had a significantly higher number of users. Like spgriffin said, btm entries are effectively duplicated per each user, so many users can fill up the btm quickly.
Something interesting: We had one machine that actively had the hanging login screen issue. I ssh’d in to perform a btmdump and it never completed. I waited several minutes. The SSH session eventually borked and I had to restart the machine. Upon restart, the BTM appeared to have been automatically reset (0mb).
If anyone’s curious -
I wiped the disk and did a clean install of 26.2 on a machine, then ran a script to create plists for 1000 background tasks in /Library/LaunchAgents. I then created 10 local users and logged into them one at a time. The machine broke on the 7th.
Hopefully that’s finally reproduceable enough for the Apple guy I’ve been talking to to forward it somewhere.
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