Hi there. Long time, no blog.
I’ve got a lot to share about what I’ve been up to, but I wanted to share something simple for now. In my current role I am using Erase All Content & Settings or DFU’ing a Mac a lot. Like, A LOT. I can spend my morning testing a deployment going to 1:1 Macs, where I’ll reset a Mac three or four times. Then in my afternoon I find myself testing app behavior on a shared Mac persona, and comparing the behavior on different macOS versions. There’s lots of bongs and a few “macOS contains..”
All this is to say, I’m always running DFU Blaster Pro and Apple Configurator 2. The thing is, what I’m doing is pretty simple and repetitive. DFU Blaster Pro is great and I can DFU a Mac in a few seconds.. but if I can do it faster, why not? (Honestly, it’s Apple Configurator 2 that is a little tedious)
I discovered the command line utility macvdmtool kind of randomly on Kyle Ericson’s GitHub. He’s made an installer for it but you can also download and build macvdmtool from the AsahiLinux GitHub. Using it and Apple Configurator 2’s cfgutil, I have an Apple Shortcut to DFU a Mac and restore an IPSW I’ve already downloaded.
The rest of the shortcuts listed are a topic for another post.
Here’s the Apple Shortcut configuration. From my testing I’ve found that macvdmtool’s step has to be run with sudo and also with Run as Administrator enabled.
You can modify this shortcut to download and restore the latest macOS by omitting -I and the file path. I have to admit I’m ridiculously late to the Apple Shortcuts game, so I’m open for any ideas. I can picture an Apple Shortcut with a file picker so you can choose the IPSW to restore.
If you have any feedback you can find me on Mastodon and MacAdmins Slack. Happy DFU’ing.
Next blog post, we’ll be taking a look at Jamf’s Self Service+ which is available to customers as of this week.