Need help with an ongoing OS X issue

[msnowdon]

Hi,

We have been experiencing MacBooks partially freezing. The problem is intermittent but widespread. I would say we noticed this with Yosemite & El Capitan, possibly Mavericks. When I say partially frozen, I noticed things like the left side of the menu bar does not respond but the right side that has the clock, WiFi, Notification center is fine. I can open apps but then I cant do anything with them such as type an address in Safari or a command in Terminal. If I relaunch Finder, I usually lose the menu bar altogether. Ive looked in Activity monitor and the console logs but again cant sort or click on anything.

I then tried Casper Remote from another laptop. If I choose "share screen" it still shows the same symptoms, however if I logon as the casperscreenshare account, nothing is frozen so it seems to be contained to that current user's settings.

I figured someone out there must have come across this since we are all Mac users. I've searched long and hard for an answer but have yet to find one. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Mark

[CapU]

Hi
Do you have any network shares mounted on the desktop?

[msnowdon]

Yes & no. There are mounted network shares on the desktop when a user first logs on but when the computer goes to sleep, the majority of them lose the shares until they log off and back on or reboot.

I have a MacBook in front of me this very moment that is hung up and the network shares are not showing. I cant even check /volumes because it's not responding.

[stevewood]

@msnowdon I've been seeing something similar on our El Cap machines. Users reporting that when waking from sleep the machine will not accept any input from keyboard, clicking on an app does not necessarily change focus. A restart fixes the issue, generally.

What I've tracked it down to, in our case, is a conflict between two config profiles that are both touching the Security pref pane. This is a known bug in 9.82 (which we are on). We have one config profile that is setting FileVault and another that is setting the "Require password" dialog in the Security pane. Once I remove the user from the FileVault config profile, issue jamf removemdmprofile and then jamf manage the problem appears to go away.

I'm waiting for 9.9x or 10 to hopefully fix the bugs in config profiles and the Security pane before I place more users in the FV config profile.

[msnowdon]

@stevewood That might be my issue. I'm going through my Config profiles now. I usually only configure 1 payload per profile but I do have a couple of "custom" payloads that touch the same plist files as a couple of other Configuration Profiles which is probably a big no no.

I cant just un-scope the devices from the profiles? I have to remove and re-manage them?

Thanks, I think I now have something to go on.

[stevewood]

@msnowdon In my case I found that just removing them from the config profile did not remove the setting from the machine. So I went and and removed and re-managed.