T O P

Activate macOS VNC Over SSH

I ran into this one today while working on a personal project. I had SSH access to a Mac Mini running Big Sur that I didn’t have hooked up to a monitor or keyboard. After digging around, I found I could enable VNC access via these commands.

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resouces/kickstart \
 -activate -configure -access -on \
 -configure -allowAccessFor -allUsers \
 -configure -restart -agent -privs -all

If that doesn’t work, this will set a custom password not tied to any user account:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart \
-activate -configure -access -on \
-clientopts -setvnclegacy -vnclegacy yes \
-clientopts -setvncpw -vncpw mypasswd \
-restart -agent -privs -all

When you’re done (since you don’t want to leave it enabled 24/7 for security reasons), disable with:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart \
-deactivate -configure -access -off

Managing Alerts for Non-Certified Dell Drives in OpenManage

The pricing for Dell physical drives, especially in servers is often outrageously expensive. Of course, they come with Dell ProSupport so often the price is worth it. Sometimes though, you’ll need to buy and use drives that are not from Dell. If you do this, OpenManage will throw alerts about being non-certified, which will throw off monitoring. Here is the fix:

Open stsvc.ini located in either C:\Program Files\Dell\SysMgt\sm or C:\Program Files (x86)\Dell\SysMgt\sm depending on whether you have the 32-bit/64-bit version. Next, look for the section near the top that reads

; nonDellCertified flag for blocking all non-dell certified alerts.
NonDellCertifiedFlag=yes

Change NonDellCertifiedFlag=yes to NonDellCertifiedFlag=no and save the file. Lastly, restart the Dell OpenManage service, called DSM SA Data Manager, in your Services Manager. Voila!

Firefox Issues on RDS / RDP

I had a user complain of some weird issues in RDP, the biggest one being that they couldn’t right-click in the taskbar. I found a few other reports of such issues and found the solution was to turn off hardware acceleration in the Options menu. Once I did that and restart Firefox, everything was working!