Jamf School is great for managing iPads.
Jamf School for Macs is a less clear proposition:
+ Cheaper
+ All in one place
+ A few nice touches (see previously)
– Not as powerful
– Doesn’t have an on-device management binary
– Some things are downright fiddly to do!
One such area of challenge I have come across is with how custom profiles are managed. Jamf School has lots of built-in profile creation options (including the ability to build and manage the dock…gasp!). But if there are areas that aren’t catered for, it’s perfectly happy to push out a custom profile built elsewhere.
This works fine.
The only issue comes when you want to update a custom profile for Mac. There is a very inviting ‘replace profile’ button that — in theory — allows you to upload a new profile to replace an existing one.
This is where the fun starts.
If the profile identifier of the new profile is not the same as the old profile, the old profile will remain on the scoped managed computers with the new profile installed as well. Invariably, this means that the settings you want changed won’t take effect because there is a conflict between the two profiles.
If we then remove this new profile, the older profile will remain on the Mac because Jamf School no longer knows the identifier of the old profile to remove it. And as it is an MDM installed profile, only MDM can remove it.
If you’re an organised sort of person and have kept a copy of all custom profiles saved elsewhere, simply upload it to Jamf School, scope it to the affected Macs and then remove/unscope/delete it. This will then trigger the MDM command to remove it.
If, however, you don’t have the original custom profile, fear not: all is not lost!
On the Mac with the orphaned profile, simply open Terminal and run the following command:
profiles -C -v
This will then spit out a list of all the profiles installed on the Mac in sufficient detail so that you can find the ‘profile identifier’ name of the offending profile.
Simply recreate a profile (perhaps using iMazing) with this same profile identifier, upload it Jamf School and then scope and then remove/delete the profile. Jamf School will then happily remove the old profile in question.
From now on, I will definitely add a new profile on Jamf School rather than replacing an existing one!
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