Macintosh Software

[sbrunk]

We have a number of Macintosh computers on our network. It appears that the Macs that are running older versions of OS X are scanned properly and all information is collected, including installed software. However, the Macs that are running the latest version of OS X, 10.11 or El Capitan, are scanned and some information is collected, but no installed software is shown. Is anyone else seeing this? We are on version 5.3.17 of Lansweeper right now. Is this perhaps fixed in the latest versions? I checked the changelog but didn't see anything about it.

[DonLeo]

This error was reported a couple of weeks ago, as follows:

"The bug is related to scan of Mac's and the article 'http://www.lansweeper.com/kb/159/apple-mac-scanning-requirements.html', saying that 'A Standard user should be sufficient'"

This is true only for older versions of OSX; for the (1 or 2 (El Capitano)) newest versions it's not correct. There you need the SSH user account to have administrative rights, which should be avoided, if possible. Our testing was done using Lansweeper version 5.3.0.22-24


And here's the reply from Support:

"Hi,
Thank you for your email.

We haven't specifically tested Lansweeper with El Capitan. Lansweeper needs SSH access to the Mac computer to be able to run the system_profiler command and retrieve data. In all of the tests we did with previous OS X releases, a Standard user was sufficient to run this command.

We'll try to test with El Capitan, but this may take a while to be honest. All of our developers are currently busy with our Lansweeper 6.0 help desk beta. If El Capitan requires additional privileges to access the system_profiler command, there is not much we can do about this. At best, we can update our knowledge base to explain which privileges are required"

However still no update to be seen on the webpages, so I do not agree this problem is solved in any way, as stated

[Susan_A]

DonLeo wrote:
However still no update to be seen on the webpages, so I do not agree this problem is solved in any way, as stated

The support ticket quoted in your post doesn't state that we resolved the issue. The way we interpreted your email is that you were not able to scan El Capitan with a Standard user, but that you *were* able to do so with an administrator. We stated that we hadn't tested this, but that if El Capitan inherently requires an administrator to run the system_profiler command, we couldn't really do much about this. We could only update our knowledge base to state that an administrator is required for El Capitan.

From what you are posting now, it seems that you are *not* able to scan El Capitan with an administrator either, which is not how we interpreted your email. You appear to be implying as well that the problem is limited to software data, as it is for user sbrunk, which wasn't clear to us from your email either. We assumed you weren't able to scan *any* Mac data with a Standard user.

sbrunk wrote:
Yeah, I agree this issue is not "solved." The SSH account we're using has admin rights on all of our Macs and scans of the El Capitan Macs still do not successfully retrieve the installed software. We are still on version 5.3.0.17 of Lansweeper. We'll be upgrading at some point but it may be a bit.

Please contact support@lansweeper.com and provide the information requested in my previous post. We'll troubleshoot via email. What you are reporting is not a known bug and not something we have even attempted to implement a fix for. DonLeo did report via email that he had issues scanning El Capitan, but:

• We assumed that he *was* able to scan El Capitan with an administrator.
  
• We assumed that he could not scan *any* data with a non-administrator, i.e. that the problem was not specifically related to software.
  
• We haven't been able to fully test El Capitan yet to confirm which privileges it requires to run various system commands.

[Susan_A]

I'm not aware of any issues with this, not in the older 5.3.0.17 Lansweeper release either. It is always recommended that you update to the latest release however. Could you update by following these instructions, try rescanning the problem computers and see if the issue persists. Click the Assets link at the top of the console, tick the checkboxes in front of the assets, hit the Rescan button on the left and wait for the Lastseen date listed on your computer webpages to update.

If the issue does persist, please contact support@lansweeper.com and provide the information below. We will troubleshoot via email.

• Description of the problem.
  
• Program Files (x86)\Lansweeper\Service\Errorlog.txt, as present on your Lansweeper server.
  
• Screenshots of one problem computer's Lansweeper webpage. Show us the following tabs: Summary, Software, Errors (if it exists).
  
• Output of this tool for the same problem computer. Run the tool from your Lansweeper server to the problem computer, submit your SSH credential and select as the Datatype SPApplicationsDataType.