techy_support

Am I the only sysadmin who doesn't drink coffee?

Steve: *"I'm sooooo important, the rules don't apply to me."*

>My question for you is how often is the sync time IF you're NOT using the sync button each time you make a change? Usually just a few minutes. I *think* that Intune automatically attempts to sync with the appropriate macOS devices that are having config profiles added/removed. If it doesn't happen in about 5 minutes, sync it manually or restart the Mac, because *all* the policies in Intune get run again when a Mac gets restarted.

>iOS devices: InTune is a bit better for iOS. However, one of the major drawbacks is that it takes 8 - 24 HOURS to send any MDM command, where as Jamf Pro (and most other MDMs) will take less than 1 MINUTE. As someone who has extensive experience with both JAMF Pro and Intune (my previous job was managing almost 30k iPads and 2k Macs with JAMF Pro; my current job is managing a much smaller fleet with Intune), I would vote that JAMF Pro *far* surpasses Intune for iOS and iPadOS in terms of usability, flexibility, granularity, and reporting, especially as your fleet size increases. Plus macOS, of course. *HOWEVER*, the idea that Intune takes "8-24 hours to send any MDM command" is not accurate in the slightest, at least for Apple devices (Windows devices are a different ballgame). Make the change in Intune, wait maybe 1-2 minutes, sync the device, and it happens fast...just like in JAMF Pro. It's all built on APNS just like all the other Apple MDMs. The difference is in the *reporting speed*. JAMF Pro updates it's reports much, much faster than Intune, which can take a few minutes (example: a script that Intune deploys to a Mac might *run* quickly, but the report showing that it ran might take awhile to show up in Intune). Part of Intune's issues (for macOS) is lack of good documentation about how it works behind the scenes on the device, and where to go for troubleshooting. I've found a few "gotchas" that just aren't documented anywhere I can find, and I only discovered them through trial and error. * Example 1: the limitation on line length for shell scripts. [Microsoft's documentation](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/apps/macos-shell-scripts) shows a 200KB file size limit but doesn't speak of a *line limit* for scripts. There didn't used to be a line limit that I could tell, but one day awhile back a 2,500 line shell script I was running on all my Macs stopped running, and I discovered through some troubleshooting that Microsoft had imposed a line limit of ~1,200 lines. I can't find that documented *anywhere*. * Example 2: Microsoft's documentation doesn't tell you where they store the local logs for Intune on Macs (if you're curious, they're under /Library/Logs/Microsoft/Intune). They don't also tell you that if you try to sync your Mac to Intune too soon after another sync, Company Portal will *say* it successfully synced, but the actual log file says *"Not enough time has passed since last check-in; adjusting check-in request."* and then doesn't really do anything. It's best to wait about 5 minutes between syncing your Mac with Intune so it will do a full sync instead of just gaslighting you into thinking it synced, when it didn't.

I'm still running a Brother HL-5140 I bought in *2004* when I went to college. Works great.

As of this month, my CCNA is now old enough to drink in the US.

Kinda wondering if we went to the same high school lol

There are lots of *button-pushers* in IT. And by that I mean "people who have memorized that pressing a certain button generates a certain response, but they don't know *why*". They don't really have the concepts down, they just memorize things and go through life. Unfortunately this also leads to a severe lack of troubleshooting ability; it can be hard to troubleshoot something if you don't know why it's supposed to work a certain way. Most of them don't even Google the answer to things, or don't even know *what* to Google to look for an answer. I worked for a large school district at a former job (80k users). Our IT department was about 70 people (including desktop support techs, server team, voip team, networking team, software deployment, management, and a few others). Out of all those people, I would say that there were only maybe 5-10 of us who actually knew the concepts behind how their area of expertise worked. And out of those 5-10 people, maybe only 2-3 who had any functional knowledge about a part of IT outside of their own specialty, so once they started looking at things past that, they needed a lot of help. It is a rare person who can conceptualize the "full view" of things to see how everything fits together.

I used to work in public K-12 edu, so our data storage needs were much different than higher ed. Sucks that they're limiting space so much for you in higher ed. I posted [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/7xfnfz/if_youve_ever_wondered_how_cloud_storage/) in Feb. of 2018 with my district's usage. TL;DR, for those too lazy to click: ~60k accounts, of which only about 1/3rd of them stored *anything* in their OneDrive. With 19k users actually using OneDrive, the cumulative storage for all 19k users was *17TB*. The top 10 users accounted for 15% of that 17TB number (#1 was using 680GB, #2 was using 300GB, and I was #3 at about 275GB), and most of those users were in the IT department. The top 100 users accounted for about 40% of the overall usage. The top 2,000 users had 1GB+ stored, with the other 17k users all storing less than 1GB each.

>I think one of the greatest pieces of general life advice, for anyone, is to give a genuine, emphatic thank you to every single person who ever does something for you, whether it's the cashier at the drive through, your coworker, your friend, your employee, your child, or just a stranger who held a door open for you. Even if it's something you feel like they had an obligation to do or something that they owed you. Just say thank you. Slightly off topic for /r/sysadmin, but, being able to say "Thanks!" and showing genuine appreciation for things is a big green flag in relationships. Source: I was previously married to a woman who never showed any appreciation for anything I did in our marriage. It's like "Thanks" wasn't part of her vocabulary (along with "I'm sorry", which she was also incapable of saying). We're divorced now.

When you log in and open the "Portfolio" view, it shows you all your accounts at once. Currently, only the 401k accounts are viewable. You can't see *anything* else right now. All those systems are down. A brokerage having their systems go down during active trading hours is a *major* issue.

I manage macOS with Intune. Previous experience managing Macs was with JAMF Pro. Intune is just terrible compared to JAMF Pro when it comes to macOS. One of my big frustrations is that it's just so damn *slow*.

I fucking *despise* timesheets. I'm salaried, exempt, and still have to do them so they can charge my hours to specific projects and time buckets. It is *infuriating*. My company spends more time worrying about *how long something will take* instead of just *doing the damn work*.

Several years ago I was involved in a project to update and distribute about a few thousands iPads to students. We also wanted them charged before distribution so the students could start using them as soon as the iPads finished enrolling. At first we did have them charging in stacks (just due to lack of space), and I noticed some were getting warm and showed the overheating symbol. One of our warehouse guys took some pieces of wood (4x4s, specifically) and cut some slots in them at a slight angle, just deep enough for an iPad. That way the iPads didn't overheat, and were angled enough that we could easily see their charge status without having to bend over. After that we could charge a lot of iPads at once, all held upright in these long pieces of wood, and none of them overheated. It worked great. I also plugged the whole charging setup into a watt meter, which could easily give us an estimate of overall charge status from a quick glance (since the charging rate starts to drastically drop off once they hit about 80%)