Autologin for Catalina?

[arnoldtaw]

On Mojave, we deploy (lab) iMac using "kcpassword" method that auto login to an account upon enrolment completion which then runs DEPNotify to complete/start the initial setup. That same setup is not working for Catalina.

Any help would be appreciated.

[m_donovan]

We also setup an auto login for our Provisioning process. It is working as expected on Catalina. I have a package with the kcpassword file and a defaults write postinstall script that sets the user as auto login. The package is installed on enrollment complete.

[arnoldtaw]

@m.donovan The package (kcpassword file and post install script) that we have for Mojave is not working for Catalina. Was there any changes required or you made to work with Catalina? Like, changing permission or location to the kcpasssword file or editing the script?


Thanks in advance.

[mpenrod]

Catalina has been a royal pain. We autologin to Guest on our lab systems and upgrading to Catalina breaks it. You have to turn off Guest and re-enable it. I suppose so a new key can be generated. Maybe it's a similar situation?

[michael_sharpe]

@arnoldtaw Did you resolve the kcpassword / auto login issue with Catalina? If so, will you share what steps you took?

[arnoldtaw]

@michael.sharpe I am unable to automate this on Catalina. Our organization might entirely skip Catalina and go with Big Sur.

[brunerd]

I made a couple scripts to do this without Python dependency: setAutomaticLogin.jamf.sh (use in a jamf policy) and setAutomaticLogin.sh (standalone) and expound upon them here: Automating automatic login for macOS

Regarding Catalina it seems it became very sensitive to whether the length of kcpassword was a multiple of 12 which didn't matter so much to previous and even future versions of macOS (Big Sur+ doesn't care!), and then it seemed to be very sensitive to what the padding characters were, sheesh what a pain Catalina!

[khurram]

@brunerd If the account is locked and computer is restarted, the account stays locked even after the computer restarts. Why is this happening ?