TIL (thing I learned)
Had a user upgrade to macOS 10.14.1 and no printers showed up anymore.
So using my Google fu I found some posts (see one below) which described a novel way to reset the print queue on macOS. An old trick apparently. Learn something new everyday.
A quick trip to a terminal and it worked! The existing printers returned to System Preferences and printing resumed.
$ cancel -a
I love Autopkg and Autopkgr. They feed Munki and they keep me fed.
Sometimes Autopkg gives an error that doesn’t make sense since you don’t have enough info. Like this one:
That’s no way to make friends. Nope.
If even I understood all that… which is saying a lot. It doesn’t tell us what to do, or where to go to fix it.
Git makes sense, but maybe not in the context of Autopkgr errors. It wants us to “Git add or rm” (remove) offending items, but what does it have to do with what we’re doing at this moment? Hmm. Ok, we know that autopkgr uses autopkg which uses git but that still leaves us in the dark about what’s going on.
Drop down in terminal and poke at autopkg. That always helps.
bash-3.2$ autopkg Usage: autopkg <verb> <options>, where <verb> is one of the following: help (Display this help) info (Get info about configuration or a recipe) install (Run one or more install recipes. Example: autopkg install Firefox -- equivalent to: autopkg run Firefox.install) list-processors (List available core Processors) list-recipes (List recipes available locally) make-override (Make a recipe override) processor-info (Get information about a specific processor) repo-add (Add one or more recipe repo from a URL) repo-delete (Delete a recipe repo) repo-list (List installed recipe repos) repo-update (Update one or more recipe repos) run (Run one or more recipes) search (Search for recipes on GitHub.) version (Print the current version of autopkg) autopkg <verb> --help for more help for that verb
Looking at all that we notice that “repo-update” is most likely the autopkg command that gets activated when Autopkgr gui “update repos now” button gets clicked.
Running autopkg with repo-update option gets us a better error message.
Attempting git pull for /Users/awesome/Library/AutoPkg/RecipeRepos/ com.github.autopkg.wardsparadox-recipes... ERROR: Pull is not possible because you have unmerged files. Please, fix them up in the work tree, and then use 'git add/rm <file>' as appropriate to mark resolution and make a commit.
So, at least we know now what is causing that error that Autopkgr showed us. Quick fix:
autopkg repo-delete https://github.com/autopkg/wardsparadox-recipes.git
And then we go on and pretend like nothing happened and continue on with our day, amirate? Maybe we go to the Mac Admins Slack autopkg channel and ask our colleagues, or post on the autopkg mail-list. Or we write a blog post.
More information:
The Autopkgr read me has troubleshooting tips
In the archives:
I first wrote about troubleshooting Autopkgr 2 years ago
While awaiting my awesome Part.2 of how to set up Munki we will look at quick fix I made recently to troubleshoot AutoPkgr issues I was having.
I have AutoPkgr set up with several sites as a quick and easy way to get updates of free and licensed software into Munki. Strangely, I ran into an error on my test box, and not on my deployments with clients. So it was something I had done, but what did I do?
AutoPkgr python error
At first I thought that one of the recent updates to AutoPkgr had broken the application. But since it was running correctly elsewhere I had to quickly rule that out. Running the recipes, which looks for new updates of certain applications, kept giving me a python error. How do you troubleshoot this? Re-install Python? De-compile AutoPkgr? Rant on the MacEnterprise maillist? No, that won’t help. 🙂
AutoPkgr is a very nice GUI front end to the excellent AutoPkg project. AutoPkgr installs Git and AutoPkg which are needed. AutoPkgr makes much of the set up much quicker and faster. It’s a great tool. Thanks to the Linde group.
AutoPkgr update dialog
The best way to troubleshoot this issue with AutoPkgr is to see if it is an issue with AutoPkgr. Let’s see if AutoPkg runs at all, and with the same errors. Now there’s an idea. So how do we run AutoPkg? Terminal. Open Terminal.app, and run AutoPkg directly. I always start with a basic “where is the app binary I want?” and then run the app with no options to see if there’s a help menu with an explanation of the switches.
AutoPkg in Terminal
Looking at what Terminal says we now know that AutoPkg is installed in the path /usr/local/bin which is a very accepted place for non-standard (extra, or optional) binaries to live. We also know that “autopkg run all” is not the correct command to run, but it was enough to elicit a better error message. In fact, the problem seems to be a “plist error” with the TextWrangler override recipe. What’s that you might be asking? AutoPkg allows the use of “overrides” which adjust a recipe. In my use of AutoPkg I set an override to add information to a recipe, specifically developer and category information so that Munki’s Managed Software Update app correctly displays the information and the user has a more logically sorted software self-serve portal. In any case, we know from this error that something is wrong with the override. I can run xmllint and clean it, I can open and find the error, or I can just delete this override and re-run AutoPkg to see if we can get somewhere.
AutoPkg transmit
In this example I run AutoPkg with the Transmit recipe and all runs well. Everything is good now. So what’s the lesson here? Be careful with your plist files. When you make your override, and add useful keys, double-check your work to avoid a broken AutoPkg.
DAM SAN 