Mobile Users getting black screen and no dock "randomly" at startup

jstaub
New Contributor

Hello,

I seem to have an odd thing happening to staff using newer Macbook Air and JAMF Pro.

Random times, starting up, in the morning...they get a black/blank screen and no dock.  They are forced to restart one to six times, and then all comes up and works fine. 

I have been going thru the support side, and they keep asking me to redo/reimage the machine.  (it is multiple, now...and different users reporting the same). Even new deployments, so a "reimage" won't fix this.

I am hoping someone has an idea, or has seen this behavior, to give me something to look for in the configs, profiles, etc. to change, tweak, and/or disable. 

Any help/assistance/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

5 REPLIES 5

BWonderchild
New Contributor III

Could resetting the SMC/PRAM fix it for these devices?

Tried that...also tried permission repair.  I still think a JAMF profile or config conflict, but not finding anything concrete in logs.  Thanks for the suggestion.

BWonderchild
New Contributor III

Hmm. Is is consistent to those affected devices? IE if they start tomorrow would it do the same thing? Could isolate it by removing the profiles off an affected device and then having them login.

 

I'd like to...however, 16 teacher machines share the profiles...being a teacher "group".  Many different ones inter-weaved...  I haven't figured out "which" is the conflict, and was afraid to cause further/more issues playing with live groups.  I've been trying to slowly create "dupe" groups to test with, but I haven't pinpointed the root cause(s) yet...sadly.  New deployments got the issue too, so I know it won't be fixed by a reimage...it has to be a rogue policy/setting.

Some days, the teachers state it starts right up and logs in fine...other days, it takes 2-6 reboots to get past this issue/effect.  So random, and the logs didn't point to anything else, at the time, other than "DeviceInfoActiveManagedUsers" command that shows at the times two teachers told me "specifically".  JAMF Support didn't seem too concerned with that finding.  I am still green, with this in-depth...  I used CCC and DeployStudio for cloning for years.  New headspace for me.  lol

jstaub
New Contributor

Interesting enough...desktop/iMacs, in district, do not exhibit this behavior...  Only teacher/Macbook Air/Mobile accts.  Older setups, of the same machines/OS running profiles, from Profile Mgr, do not have this issue.  I am still "hoping"/going back and forth with support.  I have our NetAdmin looking at ports, "just in case".  I am just at a loss on how to determine the cause and/or find a resolve, before deploying even more new machines into this same predicament.  I have looked thru all "I" can..., sent logs, etc.  Just confused and frustrated...at this point.