Sierra Distribution Point cannot Mount itself

Jason
Contributor II

Hello,

Currently we have a single File Share Distribution Point running on macOS Sierra (recently upgraded from El Capitan). When we deploy a package to it we receive the error:

verbose: Parsing Policy <POLICYNAME>... 
verbose: The Management Framework Settings are up to date. 
verbose: Found 1 matching policies. 
Executing Policy <POLICYNAME> 
Mounting <FQDN> 
**verbose: Result of mount attempt: Too many levels of symbolic links **
verbose: Result code of mount attempt: 62 Could not mount distribution point "FQDN" 
Running command /Library/Application Support/McAfee/install.sh -i... 
Result of command: /bin/sh: /Library/Application Support/McAfee/install.sh: No such file or directory

After talking with support we found out that Sierra changed things and it can no longer mount a file share that it's hosting. So the suggestion was to manually install any and all packages that we need to on that server and no longer use jamf to deploy packages to it......

Not a great response in my opinion. In any case, I've already thought of a few better workarounds, but I'm wondering what others in the community are doing to handle this situation. Is anyone doing any of the following, or perhaps have a better approach?

1) Eliminate File Share Distribution Points running on macOS, and instead use Windows/Linux File Share DP's instead (seems the simplest, but have never used Windows SMB FSDP's for mac's, concerned there may still be a performance hit vs the AFP FSDP on macOS)

2) Have the existing macOS FSDP keep deploying packages for workstations, but create a Windows FSDP and use it exclusively for packages scoped to the macOS FSDP. The benefit of this would be if there is a downside by switching to SMB, then it won't impact users, just the packages scoped to the macOS DP

Any other ideas? Or has anyone found a hack to get Sierra to mount shares on itself? I'm going to open an Apple Case next.

3 REPLIES 3

sgoetz
Contributor

Would HTTPS DP's or JDS instances work? I don't think they mount the share.

Shawn

Jason
Contributor II

We actually switched off of JDS within the past 6 months because of all the issues with database corruption it was causing. We were told AFP share was great and had no issues....lol. We've never tried an HTTPS DP or SMB. I have heard in the past that SMB shares had performance issues, but am not sure if that is still an issue on current systems. Any known issues with HTTPS or SMB today?

sgoetz
Contributor

I use SMB here and I do have issues with about 10% of the machines unable to mount SMB shares. For those I just have to clear the failures and let the machines try again. Or I force the package to come from our JDS instance.