macos-users March 2016

macos-users@nikhef.nl

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[Macos-users] Thunderbolt Ethernet dongle stopped working due to silent security update, may also affect iMacs
by Jos Vermeulen 22 Jul '16

22 Jul '16

Dear Macintosh users, In case your Ethernet connection via a Thunderbolt Ethernet dongle stopped working: Apple has silently pushed last week a security update that caused the driver of the Ethernet interface to be blacklisted. I understand that this may not only affect Thunderbolt dongles but also Ethernet interfaces of iMacs. I have found that for my laptop this update occurred Friday evening. The effect of it became apparent yesterday morning: after booting there was no network connection: in the System Preferences (Network panel) it was reported that there was no connection via the dongle. I have spent most of the day yesterday to get the connection working again, as I found many reports with Google on problems with these dongles and recipes to get them working again. However, I did not succeed to solve the problem. In the afternoon I concluded that my dongle could be faulty and went to an iCentre shop, taking the dongle with me. There it showed the same problem as I had seen, so the conclusion was that the dongle was broken and I purchased a new one. That also did not work with my laptop, but then I realized that I could boot from an older version of MacOS that I have on a portable disk. Both dongles worked. Not yet knowing about the update of the evening before I started to look further for a cause of the problem, without success, but at the end of the afternoon Google started to find reports on the silent update. After some time also a recipe appeared of how to solve the problem and this worked for me. For more information see: https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/47tfos/warning_software_update_0315… and: http://forums.macrumors.com/threads/software-update-031-51913-will-break-yo… It is not clear to me whether it is necessary to disable system integrity checking for the fix to be applied, in any case this worked for me (taken from the mail from fropmeister of the last mailing list): "1) Disable system integrity protection as described in this article: http://www.imore.com/el-capitan-system-integrity-protection-helps-keep-malw… 2) Once you reboot, open a terminal window and move the broken version out of the way with the following commands: cd /System/Library/Extensions sudo mv AppleKextExcludeList.kext ~ (this will move it to your user's home directory, just in case. enter your login password when prompted.) Now that that's done, install the package from the linked file and reboot. When I did that my thunderbolt adapter started working again, no reconfiguration required. If everything's working, you can clean up as follows: 1) Open a terminal window again, and type "sudo rm ~/AppleKextExcludeList.kext" (and enter your password again if needed) 2) Reboot into the recovery console and re-enable system integrity protection as described in the above article." The package referred to is this: http://swcdn.apple.com/content/down...1zfy5lkrw3v1oe/AppleKextExcludeList_1… Best regards, Jos Vermeulen

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macos-users March 2016