At the last Austin Apple Admins meetup I gave a talk about building VMs designed for testing DEP and MDM. Part of what I mentioned was using vfuse to generate random serial numbers with the -s flag when using a template to generate a VM. Sometimes it’s helpful to be able to quickly generate a random serial number—one that is well-formed and won’t break an profile-based enrollment in an MDM—without having to build a whole new VM.

I threw together a function that can be put into a bash profile that is used as an alias to quickly generate a serial number.

Just throw that in your bash profile (which you can get to by typing nano .bash_profile (replace nano with your editor of choice) to add the above function as an alias to your profile. Open a new terminal window and you can simply type randomsn to have a well-formed serial number generated for you.

gl;hf
💖 Em