What scripts and helpdesk tools do you use with self service?

[neilrooney_old]

Hi everyone! I've been slowly building out our self service with software from VPP, scripts for updating and some help desk tools.

I was hoping you all could share some of the scripts and other tools you use for your users. There have been some older threads showing off their tools but they are a little sparse on how to make them work. One great one I saw, but have no idea how to get it to work, was an emergency backup to Google Drive.

I would love to see some scripts for updating Adobe CC and some other nifty scripts for helpdesk. Attached is what I have so far.

Cheers everyone! :)

[ThijsX]

[neilrooney_old]

Could you share the scripts for updating Adobe CC, re-index spotlight and display computer information? @txhaflaire Repair outlook search is also done via script?

[Hugonaut]

Ours are very environment specific but I can share an "Uptime" Script that lets the students / staff users check the computer uptime with a click of the button. I deployed this as an applescript applet to the computer and the self service button runs the app. If they really want to they can run the Uptime app themeselves via Spotlight, save it to the dock or use Self Service.

try

    set AppleScript's text item delimiters to " "

    --message, space after " is intentional
    set TIMINGC to " If the Uptime Exceeds 12:00 (12 Hours), Restart your MacBook."

    --uptime
    set uptime to do shell script "uptime"


    --Selects 1st line of command line which contains Uptime
    set FullUptimeDialog to paragraph 1 of uptime


    set TEXT4 to text item 4 of FullUptimeDialog
    set TEXT5 to text item 5 of FullUptimeDialog
    set TEXT6 to text item 6 of FullUptimeDialog
    set TEXT7 to text item 7 of FullUptimeDialog


    --Displays Uptime (Days, Hours XX:XX, Users & Message)
    display dialog "Uptime: " & TEXT4 & TEXT5 & TEXT6 & TEXT7 & TIMINGC with icon ":System:Library:CoreServices:CoreTypes.bundle:Contents:Resources:Clock.icns" as alias buttons {"Okay"}

end try

[dtommey]

@neilrooney

Outlook Support Tools

Just push it out to your fleet and then set a policy that runs

open /path/to/OutlookSearchRepair.app

[dtommey]

[dgeiler]

I am new to Jamf is it possible to know how and where to get these applications or packages?

[ThijsX]

@neilrooney What @dtommey said, just create a policy and push it to a /tmp folder oi. Then the one liner to open the app.
For the others you can contact me at slack if you would like to!

[mark_mahabir]

See here for the Display Computer Information stuff.

[Seetendra]

I would recommend getting the Office cleanup applications as well Like

1. MailToOutlook
2. CrashLogger

Link : https://macadmins.software/tools/

[Hugonaut]

@mark.mahabir Nice! considering changing mine around!

[mack525]

I see some great examples here! In the process of adding some more tools.

[wildfrog]

The "Optimize" policy flushes system and user caches, checks the disk, and reboots. It' sounds more professional than "plesae restart your computer".

[wildfrog]

@Seetendra We looked at the MS-supplied app to set default, but it only did so for mail and not for calendar events or contacts. This is why we use the app that Rich Trouton developed. It uses duti to assign Outlook as default for contacts and events as well as mail.

[daniel_ross]

Would love to know some of the resources, scripts etc. where you got some of this from and if any of these are built in even better!

[maiksanftenberg]

@mack525 What you exactly do in the "Set Time Zone" policy?

[mack525]

@maik.sanftenberg When used with Self Service, enables a non-admin user to change time zone on his or her Mac.The script will offer to set the time zone automatically if it detects the time zone is set manually. Otherwise, the script will first present a short list of commonly used time zones. If selected, the script will present a full set choices based on UNIX time zones. Full script is on my Github Page

[mack525]

@txhaflaire Curious to see what your "Tools for tech's" has in it :) if you dont mind sharing.

[wildfrog]

@daniel_ross For me it was a case of what things could I create a button for so the users could do what they were asking to do on their own and not call me. From there it was just finding/stealing a script to do those things.

@txhaflaire What is the difference between "Repair Outlook Search" and "Re-Index Spotlight"?

[emily]

Ours are largely network/cert related, but there are a few other handy things in there too. (Sorry, had to scrub some titles.)

Much to my chagrin, "Fix Skype for Business" doesn't involve burning it with fire.

[alextorres]

Nice @emily... icons8 ftw!

[tlarkin]

@emily dIsAbLe GaTeKeEpEr? ???????

Also, love the easy button icon.

The one tool I always find handy is a log scraper. Often times you will ask your help desk for logs, often times they forget what logs are relevant, you can even document how to get the logs in a wiki, and they may not read it. So, make a policy that copies all relevant logs into a folder on the user's desktop and zips it, then the user can attach that to a help desk ticket.

Also, out of curiosity, how often does all the flush caches and fix disk permission actually fix stuff? I cannot say I have seen those tools really fix a Mac outside a few very rare exceptions in my time.

[emily]

@tlarkin more of a pause, for when developers need to YOLO weird tool installers. It's actually rarely used, but has been handy for some people. I think the timer is like 15 minutes.

[tlarkin]

@emily those pesky developers! I also like the idea of labeling that type of stuff YOLO MODE so they know they are not doing the right thing, haha

[ThijsX]

@wildfrog The difference is that Re-index spotlight builds up a new cache file for the use of Spotlight in case applications or files are not found correct. The outlook search repair fixes issues when you search for particular emails in Outlook and don't show up.

@mack525 Sure, no problem!

[AxelK]

@neilrooney how do you handle the dns flush script with mdnsresponder and the formerly flush dns?

@emily whats about this fix skype for business?

[emily]

@AxelK it's a script that cleans up keychain entries and application save state/cache data.

[defiler]

<delete>

[defiler]

@txhaflaire do you require logout after "Font rendering macOS Mojave" (i assume its defaults write -g CGFontRenderingFontSmoothingDisabled -bool NO) or it there a way to apply changes without it? thank you.

[defiler]

@emily how do you fix parentalcontrolsd issue? i we used to unload the daemon, but it stopped working in 10.12 afair.

[defiler]

our one.

[jr139]

Shout out to @neilrooney and everyone who has contributed to this post! You've inspired me and given us some ideas for a "help desk" category of our own in Self Service.

[khey]

Hi @defiler , can you tell us more about your "Get Wifi Guest Password"?

Thanks

[neilrooney_old]

@emily I would be really interested what the "assign this mac" function does?

[neilrooney_old]

@wildfrog how are you achieving the reset printer system?

[nahrens]

The "Provision" tile is scoped to computers that have been enrolled to Jamf in the past 3 days and is used on computers by the technician for computers that we either can't enroll into our DEP or computers that, even if we can, we can't reset. Our provision policy that is triggered on enrollment only runs if our local admin account doesn't exist, so for already existing computers it doesn't run. With this policy we can force it to run.

[AxelK]

@emily a bit ot but we are having loggin issues with some users with sfb. i'm looking into this a long time but never found a solution. maybe i'm missing something. your script could be my holy grail?!

Whats the issue for using this script?

[DBrowning]

Hey @AxelK, I can't speak for @emily, but we had a lot of SfB sign-in issues and we found that basically blowing away a few key files seemed to fix any login issues we saw.

Below is the code we used for our Fix SfB as we have moved over to Teams now.

#!/bin/sh

#gets user name as variable
user=`python -c 'from SystemConfiguration import SCDynamicStoreCopyConsoleUser; import sys; username = (SCDynamicStoreCopyConsoleUser(None, None, None) or [None])[0]; username = [username,""][username in [u"loginwindow", None, u""]]; sys.stdout.write(username + "
");'` 

#Close SFB
if ( pgrep "Skype for Business" > /dev/null ); then
    echo "Killing SFB"
    killall "Skype for Business"
else
    echo "SFB is not running"
fi


#Remove files for SFB
rm -rfv /Users/$user/Library/Preferences/com.microsoft.SkypeForBusinessTAP.plist
rm -rfv /Users/$user/Library/Logs/com.microsoft.SkypeForBusinessTAP
rm -rfv /Users/$user/Library/Application Support/Skype for Business
rm -rfv /Users/$user/Library/Containers/com.microsoft.SkypeForBusiness
rm -rfv /Users/$user/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.ApplicationRecentDocuments/com.microsoft.skypeforbusinesstap.sfl
rm -rfv /Users/$user/Library/Application Support/com.microsoft.SkypeForBusinessTAP
rm -rfv /Users/$user/Library/Cookies/com.microsoft.SkypeForBusinessTAP.binarycookies

#Remove Keychain Items
security delete-generic-password -l "Skype for Business" /Users/$user/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
security delete-generic-password -l "com.microsoft.SkypeForBusiness.HockeySDK" /Users/$user/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
security delete-generic-password -l "com.microsoft.SkypeForBusinessTAP.HockeySDK" /Users/$user/Library/Keychains/login.keychain
security delete-generic-password -l "com.microsoft.skypeforbusiness.webmeetings.HockeySDK" /Users/$user/Library/Keychains/login.keychain

[emily]

@defiler it just looks for the process and kills it. It's rarely used by anyone these days so we're likely to retire it.

@AxelK back when we migrated from hosted Exchange to O365 people had trouble getting a fresh sign-in so we made the policy to help get a fresh login prompt. Unsure if that would be related to issues you're seeing. It just goes through the keychain to look for entries for Skype for Business and deletes them, then clears the application cache data.

[SweetJames]

@neilrooney assuming that just removes all printers you can achieve this with lpadmin and use it again to re-add whichever you like
lpstat -p | cut -d' ' -f2 | xargs -I{} lpadmin -x {}