Casper Suite 9.9 now available

[Tad]

Today we released Casper Suite 9.9, adding new features for iOS 9.3, improved OS X pre-stage deployment, and more. Check out the release notes in My Assets.

For customers running their JSS on Windows Server, we’ve also updated the Windows JSS installer to make your upgrade path even smoother.

[rderewianko]

[Emmert]

For customers running their JSS on Windows Server, we’ve also updated the Windows JSS installer to make your upgrade path even smoother.

Thanks guys!

[mhasman]

[dgreening]

YES! Thank you guys for re-working the Windows installer! I upgraded my test Windows JSS from 9.9 beta to 9.9 production without any sort of issue.

[notoole]

Very pleased that existing Casper Focus classes integrated nicely into Apple Classroom.

[rmaldon]

In 9.9 if there's already an SMB share mounted, any subsequent policies will use that share.

Hallelujah!

[natesimons]

I just want to be able to enroll my school to be able to use Apple Classroom. A little frustrating that the back end of that (Apple School Manager) is still in beta.

[GSSRyan]

Has anyone had success yet with Apple Classroom? I can see all of my students now, but they all show up as "Offline"

[galionschools]

Same issue as above. Students show up as offline. Hooked up my iPad to Configurator 2 to read the console logs and it appears as though it doesn't like unsupervised devices using Classroom. Also check that the student's iPad has the EDU profile installed on it. The students I assigned to my test class didn't get that profile pushed to them for some reason or another.

A Profile Manager instance worked like gangbusters with this so it must be something in JAMF's implementation that we don't have correctly setup.

[GSSRyan]

Ours are all supervised and have the EDU profile, but still no dice. The edu profile didn't go on until I manually added the students to the classes. The smart mobile device group (via LDAP) didn't send them out.
It's also worth noting that I discovered adding ios 9.3 features to a profile that went out to 9.2 devices made the old devices confused and they lost all restrictions. Not the smoothest transition so far (especially with apple pushing out 9.3, then pulling it back causing the downloaded updates to fail, then pushing out a different 9.3, then a 9.3.1). Ugh.

[dvasquez]

Excited.. so see what this helps and fixes!

[dstranathan]

[D-010036] Fixed an issue where the JSS failed to respect the Require password immediately after sleep or screen saver begins setting in OS X configuration profiles Security & Privacy payload.

[galionschools]

Mystery solved. I forgot the Classroom app utilizes bluetooth. So you need to be within 30ft(bt radio distance) of the students iPad for the app to send commands and not show students in a perpetual offline state.

JAMF's documentation doesn't mention this but it does link to Apple's documentation that does mention bluetooth is required.

[GSSRyan]

I don't think that was the issue, since my iPad was literally on top of the one I was testing... But it's possible Bluetooth was turned off, as we've had better AirPlay experiences when it's disabled. It sure would be nice, especially in the light of this information, if apple would allow us to prevent airplane mode and toggling wifi and Bluetooth. That's our kids' favorite new trick to avoid being focused. It's also caused several to get stuck in focus when the timing is just wrong (profile hits device, kid turns off wifi, profile activates and focuses). Had to build a "ipad defibrillator" with the Lightning-to-USB-camera adapter -> USB hub -> usb Ethernet adapter setup suggested elsewhere on these boards to wake them back up!

[galionschools]

I won't say it's a silver bullet fix, but I did test it out by turning off bluetooth on an iPad I enrolled on a whim and assigned to my test class. Turning off bluetooth made the student/ipad show offline. Turning it back on made it come alive in the app. Again your mileage will vary.

I see our more enthusiastic teachers telling kids to turn bluetooth off to save battery life. It would be nice to restrict that although I suspect I would get numerous calls every other day asking why kids can't turn it off anymore. Airplane mode hasn't been a big issue for us. Kids used it last year to load cached game sites they loaded at home away from our soul crushing web filter.

[GSSRyan]

Kids used it last year to load cached game sites they loaded at home away from our soul crushing web filter.

Clever! I wish there was a way to create a tripwire type of app or profile that sat in the background until it couldn't phone home for a set period of time. Then it'd activate a "bring this device to home base" focus screen. But alas, Apple doesn't like making kernel-level stuff available to developers...

[St0rMl0rD]

Classroom uses Bluetooth?? That's weird...Looks like it's gonna be a while until it's functioning properly, hopefully by the end of next month.

[galionschools]

Yep. See here. The instructor and student sections state it's a requirement. Without the Apple School Manager piece in place the only grabbing feature right now is the screen viewing. Not too say that isn't big. Our teachers will love that and our students will loath it.

[St0rMl0rD]

Yes, but with Casper Focus, a teacher would only tell students to go to a website, to make sure they're online, and could them focus them. If we would have a chance to prohibit disabling of Bluetooth, that would be perfect, but we can't for the moment. Of course, the teacher could always reach out to the student, asking them why their iPad is offline...We'll see, have to test it out :)

[mkempster]

Any update on the issue GSSRyan mentioned about sending out updated profiles with features enabled for 9.3 and it removing all restrictions on older versions. We want to start testing the 9.3 features but still have several devices on older iOS versions and obviously do not want to impact the restrictions on those devices but we can't guarantee every iPad in our groups will have 9.3 at the time we update the profile. I want to be able to start rolling out the changes but not worry if we miss a few iPads in a group they will be running unrestricted.

[GSSRyan]

I wonder if one or several of these topics would actually be best moved to a new thread...

So it appeared to be the Bluetooth issue in terms of why the students who had the EDU profile pushed out were showing as "offline." Once it was enabled on both devices, we were live!

It's still the case that our classes which were already assigned (Mobile Device Smart Groups via LDAP) aren't sending out the profiles until the students are manually added. They all show up on the teacher's Classroom app as "Offline", but don't receive the EDU profile until they're added as individual students.

@mkempster : The way I dealt with this was by cloning the 9.2-compatible profile, then adding the 9.3 features to the new cloned profile. The original profile is scoped to a Smart Group of devices for which iOS Version NOT LIKE "9.3" and the new one is scoped to devices for which iOS Version LIKE "9.3". For safety's sake, you might want to create another Smart Group that checks for one of the apps you've disallowed in the profiles. That way you can see if anyone's roaming free.

The biggest headache I've encountered so far is with devices which received the pulled version of 9.3 when I sent out the auto-update command via JSS but didn't install before they pulled verification and got stuck in a kind of limbo. I'm having to manually go into Settings->Storage and delete the downloaded update, then it'll check again for 9.3.1 and update. It's especially weird that the update I'm deleting is over 1GB, but the replacement is only like 24MB. Not sure what to make of that.

All said, the Classroom features are really cool (especially the screen viewing), but I'd strongly suggest waiting a bit to see if Apple pushes out any more dot updates if you have any significant number of iPads to manage.

[GSSRyan]

Another "fix": I created an "All Students" class and manually assigned everyone to it. Then, when the EDU profile went out, it respected the Mobile Device Smart Groups for the various classes. At least, that's what appears to have happened. It looks like JSS just needs to implement an initial check for all devices' class membership when the feature is enabled in the JSS settings.

[FritzsCorner]

It looks like D-009351 is supposed to be fixed in this release as well. Crossing my fingers!

[skoonin]

Has anyone noticed Spotlight acting up since upgrading to 9.9? Especially when waking from sleep. My MBP Retina's fans have been going non-stop and it's the only change I made on my system. My co-worker is seeing it too.

Now seeing this in my logs on 10.11.4:

kernel[0]: process Spotlight[677] caught causing excessive wakeups. Observed wakeups rate (per sec): 256; Maximum permitted wakeups rate (per sec): 150; Observation period: 300 seconds; Task lifetime number of wakeups: 480202

[scharman]

having issues with Casper Admin connecting the file share since the upgrade, known issue?

[cdenesha]

@GSSRyan

It's also worth noting that I discovered adding ios 9.3 features to a profile that went out to 9.2 devices made the old devices confused and they lost all restrictions.

I'm testing specifically for this with a test cloud instance of JSS 9.9. I enrolled an iPad with 9.2.1 and installed the normal student restrictions. I then deployed a new profile with a test restriction of disallowing Notifications and Chrome. I still see the same 20 restrictions listed in General -> Device Management, and it seems like the iPad is acting normally. It doesn't list the 9.3 specific restrictions, so it is ignoring them.

Can you elaborate on how your devices became 'confused'?

thank you,

chris

[cdenesha]

Please implement the new 9.3 Restriction allowRadioService.

thanks,

chris

[cdenesha]

Is there anyway to download a PDF of the 9.9 Administrator's Guide, so I can read offline?

[sdagley]

The PDF of the Admin Guide (and other 9.9 related docs) can be found in the Resources folder in the Casper Suite 9.9 disk image