Apple OS Bug When Resetting OS to Factory Default — Can’t Do Offline or Manually Set IP Address
The only way I could get the system to reinstall was by using wifi — not the most secure option.
I’ve explained how I route my network through AWS for inspection and I manually set an IP address when I want to be on that network.
I reset one of my Macs because I found suspicious activity on it as I wrote about here:
It is Macbook Pro I bought in December 2023 and should have had the latest software and been latest model at that time. I bought it in Miami since there are no Apple stores in Savannah (boo hoo…)
After resetting my Mac to factory defaults I couldn’t activate it. It just sat there telling me to connect an Internet cable or wifi. I was directly connected to the Internet and had just been using the computer that way so I know it should work.
I decided to try to install offline as perhaps my firewall was blocking something. I couldn’t find any evidence of my firewall blocking anything.
I tried various recommendations for offline installations with no Internet from Apple and none of them work. I was reading various Apple documentation starting here:
Then I remembered I have to set my IP to a specific IP address to use the VPN configuration I was working on in some recent posts that pass my network through AWS for inspection. You can find that information in my network security posts related to an AWS VPN and pfSense:
The problem is that there is no option to configure your network unless you’re using WiFi. If you try to get to the network settings there’s no way to do that. The only thing I could figure out short of spending hours researching much more complicated was to switch to WiFi.
There are a few bugs here.
Can’t configure IP and network manually. Apple assumes you are using DHCP. Not everyone is. I’m sure there is a way to do it but Apple needs to make it easy to configure your network and IP address when resetting to factory defaults.
Offline installation is broken in some cases. Fix whatever is breaking the offline installation. If I hold down the power button I get to the options screen and it just spins and spins. The only “option” I have is to click continue and that sends me to choose a language and then connect to the network.
Directly connected network broken? For whatever reason my wifi connection worked when the manual connection should have still worked. It just wouldn’t go through AWS without setting the IP address manually and wouldn’t be on the VPN. It appears there is something broken about non-wifi networks but I can’t tell what it is without spending a lot more time I don’t want to spend. Is Apple assuming your router is a specific IP address or something? Is it requiring IPv6 when that’s blocked on some networks? Need to make it work in all scenarios.
Wifi has security issues. No matter how well you try to secure it, it cannot be as secure as a hard-wired connection and Apple really needs to address this problem — especially since my system was compromised and I’m not sure if it was due to running it on my wifi with all the sketchy things.
After I get it working, I may have to fix my business wifi network which was having some issues and reinstall it since installing it via the hardwired connection simply didn’t work.
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Teri Radichel | © 2nd Sight Lab 2024
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