Features
- Complete Time Machine reporting rewrite, with per-destination reporting on 10.8+
- Full support for Gruntwork 2.1
- Two Malware additions: MacKontrol & SabPab
- The Contact Menu to be quit for the current session with Command-Option Click
- Gathers information to build BlueSky remote support URLs
Bug Fixes
- Support for UPS on Laptops.
- More reliable JAMF Status reporting
- Better support for 3rd party laptop batteries
- Resolved an issue where Time Machine Triggers would fail to start a backup.
- Reduced one-off false positives related to problems reading CrashPlan settings
- Improved support from recovering from corrupted settings.
Changes
- Always report an abnormal state when CrashPlan has no destinations.
- Relies on launchd to determine of CrashPlan status should be reported.
- Reduced noise on Console.app when checking for Malware
- Improved support for custom installations summaries with Custom Branding
- Time Machine Exclusions have been moved into their own plugin.
- When our Time Machine auto-backup was in place, Time Machine is now re-enabled upon removal of our monitoring software.
So, what does this mean for you?
We expect there will be some change to the Time Machine reporting in this release. It’s passed the tests we have been able to throw at it, based on years of reports, but if you happen to run into any issues, please check out our new “Plugin Report -> Submit request” feature in the Action menu of the server.
Systems with multiple destinations are currently treated as OK if any one of them is within the allowable days. A future version of the plugin will allow setting thresholds for each. Note that because the default set of user-actions is likely to leave a stale, unused time machine destination, monitoring on each destination will not be the default.
We have seen cases where CrashPlan would report as “no destinations” one hour, then go back to normal the next. We believe we have addressed this through increased retries, however the underlying issue is that the CrashPlan settings are not available for reading when we had this issue.
As for Malware checking, we’re digging deeper into getting all the various Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions, but this is a game of whack-a-mole, and there will probably always be some we’re not checking for. Feel free to review the list in our Malware Tests repo on Github.
For those of you who put up with many JAMF Binary related warnings, we apologize. In order to prevent a failed recon from stopping our run, we weren’t giving the recon we need enough time to finish. We’ve moved that task out of our normal run, meaning that computers will show up in your dashboard faster, and we should be less noisy in general.
For those of you using Bluesky by Mac-MSP, this release gathers the right information, we’ll have the related links show up the Server Dashboard soon. Once completed, you’ll have one-click access to any computer you’re authorized to control.
Here are two Pro-Tips for the Contact Menu:
Command-Option-Clicking the menu will display an option to quit the menu. It will re-launch on login unless you hide the contact menu for that computer.
Option-Clicking your company name in the menu will bring you to the computer’s record in the Dashboard (login required)
Control-Clicking the same first item will do the same.
Bonus tip - the same Option- or Control- click in the PreferencePane’s icon will also open that computer’s URL.
We hope this release finds you in good health, and that we get to see you in person this year!
