Unable to enrol macOS 27 beta VMs in to Jamf

I have so far been unable to enrol a macOS 27 beta VM in to Jamf since initial beta release. Is this by design? I can’t find any documentation or posts on apple developer forums about this anywhere.

My agentic coding session has done some probing around in the VM and it thinks something is going wrong with Secure Keychain within the VM.

Everybody on my team is observing the same behaviour as this, and I’ve had it happening across two different laptops (one of them which is, itself, running the latest macOS 27 Beta, and the other which I created a Beta VM by installing Tahoe in the VM, logging in to iCloud, and enabling Beta channel updates)

The only thing we’ve found we can do so far is to join to Jamf in Tahoe first, but the problem I have there is, often times the option for Beta channel updates just doesn’t present itself in System Settings -> Software Update after signing in to iCloud, and I don’t know why it sometimes does but often doesn’t.

Logs from agentic coding session below:

The core log evidence

This is the whole causal chain, from the 27 guest's unified log, inside 370 microseconds. Innermost failure first:

05:24:04.967316 apsd: (CryptoTokenKit) [com.apple.CryptoTokenKit:sepkey] <sepk:* kid=0000000000000000>: (apsd) unable to generate key: error e00002e2(-536870174) ACL=<SecAccessControlRef: dk;ock(true);odel(true);osgn(true);oa(true);okd(true)>

05:24:04.967433 apsd: (Security) [com.apple.security:seckey] SecKeyCreateRandomKey_ios failed: NSOSStatusErrorDomain Code=-25308 "Failed to generate keypair" (errSecInteractionNotAllowed / Interaction is not allowed with the Security Server.)

05:24:04.967574 apsd: (DeviceIdentity) com.apple.MobileActivation.ErrorDomain Code=-1 "Failed to create reference key."

05:24:04.967600 apsd: [com.apple.apsd:courier] APSBAAClientIdentityProvider failed to obtain a BAA cert, error: com.apple.MobileActivation.ErrorDomain Code=-1 "Failed to create reference key."

05:24:04.967686 apsd: [com.apple.apsd:courier] <APSCourierConnectionManager; production>: Stream error occurred for <APSCourierConnection>: APSErrorDomain Code=1 "Told not to connect after fetching server bag: (null) - closing stream"

Read bottom-up: Secure Enclave key generation fails, so MobileActivation cannot create the reference key, so apsd cannot obtain its BAA device-identity certificate, so APNs tells it not to connect. kid=0000000000000000 means there is no key id at all. Then every courier line reports Connected on 0 interfaces, and mdmclient sets its PushWakeTopics only to get Connection Invalid for service com.apple.apsd and tear down.

The command to regenerate it: log show --predicate 'process == "apsd"' --last 60m --info | grep -iE 'BAA|unable to generate key|server bag'.

New control, collected just now

mac26 happened to be running, so I got the comparison. macOS 26.6 (25G72) guest, same host, same network, 3 days uptime:

BAA_FAILURES: 0 SEPKEY_FAILURES: 0 APNS_SOCKETS: 192.168.64.8.52286 -> 17.57.146.7.443 ESTABLISHED 192.168.64.8.52285 -> 17.253.77.203.443 ESTABLISHED (+ 3 more into 17.0.0.0/8)

No BAA or courier complaints at all over 6 hours, and live connections into Apple's network. So a virtualised guest per se is fine; the 27 guest specifically cannot mint the key. The physical host, also on macOS 27.0, likewise logged zero of both failures over 3 hours.

I've been having trouble with Fleet MDM enrollment when I have a macOS 27 beta 4 VM (on macOS 26.6 host) as I can enroll, but push notifications don't seem to be working so no profiles are pushed to the VM. Works fine if I have a Tahoe 26.6 VM. All provisioning is done via a packer build with manual operator install of the MDM enrollment profile. Raised FB23918943 about this and will try again with beta 5.

Thanks for the reply! Sounds like it's not just me ... Sorry, to clarify my original post, the initial MDM management profile does install but then I get no activity over APNS at all... and for Jamf at least (I'm less experienced with other MDMs), the APNS push after enrol is how the jamf management daemon, Self Service app etc get installed and none of that happens.

So to me it does seem like an APNS issue, I just don't know if it's my fault somehow.

Unable to enrol macOS 27 beta VMs in to Jamf
 
 
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