Jamf Nation Community

whiteb · ‎01-31-2022

Is it still the case that there is no way of allowing Location Services for a specific app, for non admin users? I don’t see a PPPC option for it, and it’s been stated that this is impossible in the past.

Zoom soft-phone client wants location services enabled for 911 call routing. Users don’t have admin rights.

I've seen someone say the below works for Big Sur, but even then I believe that just enables the general Apple location services, and not specifically for an app in particular.

#!/bin/sh

sudo /usr/bin/defaults write /var/db/locationd/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.locationd LocationServicesEnabled -int 1

sudo /usr/bin/defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.timezone.auto Active -bool true

I need Location Services checked for Zoom specifically.

whiteb · ‎04-01-2022

I ended up putting in a Jamf support ticket on this. Went back and forth a little, it got escalated. In the end, their final answer was that it's an intentional limitation on Apple's end that MDM's do not have the ability to do this. Pretty sure their reasoning is privacy. Which I get, but still..

I believe our network admin who is mainly doing the Zoom phone transition/integration said you can configure Zoom Phone admin settings to associate different subnets with different building locations. So if they're calling 911 with Zoom Phone on a Mac, it will look at their subnet and pull 911 location that way. This was the best we were able to do.

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jel-gherson · 3 weeks ago

@williamaddis and @GeorgeCasper

I am looking to use a version of your approach to approve location services for a different app. (It would actually be to use Location Services for a python script being run via the MacAdmins Python3.)

Without having actually tried it, I feel this should work. However I have encountered a different but related issue which I was wondering if you or anyone else could answer.

By manually enabling location services currently, my python script via the MacAdmin Python3 is able to utilise Location Services when run as a user. If however my python script is run via root aka sudo then it fails saying Location Services has not been authorised.

This suggests either this permission is a per-user setting or perhaps more likely root is treated differently.

So anyone seen this and has anyone been able to allow root to use Location Services? (This would make life easier since as mentioned in this discussion JAMF uses root to run scripts.)

williamaddis · 3 weeks ago

I would start by looking in /var/db/locationd/clients.plist to see how that script is listed in there. It'll probably have some com.whatever entry in there that you would want to look at changing in all the com.microsoft.teams entries in the original script. Just remember that if you are testing the script manually through Terminal or Coderunner, etc that those apps will need to have Full Disk Access granted in the Privacy & Security settings.