Testing Catalina

thebrucecarter
Contributor II

Greetings all,

This is not strictly Jamf related, although likely some parts of the deployment via Jamf may come into play, but I suspect that many of you are in similar situations to ours, where we have to deploy "last year's" macOS to our labs due to the timing of Apple's releases of new Mac operating systems.  Hence, we have Mojave in the labs for this academic year, and are just now recovering from Back To School enough to really start looking at Catalina.  The Mac systems engineers here (including me) have been playing with Catalina since the betas started after WWDC, but the more formalized, structured testing is just really kicking off now.  These days, I deal pretty much exclusively with multiuser (lab) systems, but some of our faculty and staff will start to receive Catalina as new purchases ship with it.

That's all a preface to asking the following:  Does anyone have a checklist/testing regimen for Catalina already in place?  Of course, we have our list from last year, and we know what local services need to be checked, but I'm wondering if someone already has a general plan for testing Catalina for rough spots.  I'm sure that the 64/32 bit watershed will add some extras to the whole effort.

Thank you very much in advance for any thoughts and contributions.

5 REPLIES 5

blackholemac
Valued Contributor III

Will be following this post as we are for similar reasons about one OS behind up until last school year ended at the beginning of the summer we deployed High Sierra... any Mac that went out this summer received Mojave ( A large chunk but not all). Goal is to hit the ground running on Catalina and get it mature enough that I can put it on new user machines and early adopter upgraders. i’ve been watching the 64-bit thing for over a year and have a general idea of where our pain points are going to be regarding that. Most other pain points I imagine are going to be related to new PPPC profiles and the whole “ original operating system files are on a read only partition” thing. I’m guessing that they have some form of persistent shadow volume for writes rigged up so that that becomes less of an issue.

tlarkin
Honored Contributor

I don't have a check list as I probably approach macOS management different than some, or to rather say, every Org has different uses and needs. That being stated, I am 100% Catalina ready. What I have done is the following (at a high level):

  • Validated all security tools work
  • Tested all my automation workflows and code
  • Tested and validated all third party dependencies (DEP Notify, Python 3, etc)
  • Ensured all compliance and security settings worked (config profiles and such)

The only thing I added was a profile to manage the notification center settings for apps, so users do not get prompted for certain things. I used to work in EDU so I know the timing is pretty horrible, because summer is the "get work done while no one is here," mode over the summer. Giving y'all little to no time to test. The only advice I can give is that you should take a system and wipe it clean, with a clean install of the latest Catalina beta, and run it through start to finish how you provision machines and check everything off the list

daniel_ross
Contributor III

@tlarkin sorry for bringing up a slightly old post here but what did you use for the notifications?

tlarkin
Honored Contributor

@daniel_ross I just tossed an example into a gist here Please test before using of course

abuehler
New Contributor III

@daniel_ross Check out this script by @talkingmoose .
It helps very much! ;-)