Unable to Enable/Disable Internet Sharing in 10.11 El Capitan

[DamiansDesign]

It seams El Capitan doesn't use com.apple.InternetSharing.plist for Internet Sharing anymore. I recently upgraded from Mavericks to El Capitan and my ControlPlane setup for toggling Internet Sharing on MacBook Pro on lid open/close, no longer works.

This is what I see in system.log:

com.apple.xpc.launchd[1] (com.apple.xpc.launchd.domain.system): Could not read path: path = /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.InternetSharing.plist, error = 2: No such file or directory

[dustinrue]

I've been looking into this and it's going to be awhile. Internet Sharing is done differently in 10.11

[EntilZha]

Any updates?

[dustinrue]

I haven't found a way to force the system to enable/disable Internet Sharing yet

[EntilZha]

Aside from ControlPlane, is there any terminal/shell way to do it? I imagine there is a fragile way to do it with applescript. Before finding ControlPlane I had a shell script to do it plus Alfred commands, but that doesn't work anymore either

[dustinrue]

If you can find an AppleScript that does it I can at least use that, but as of right now I haven’t been able to capture what calls System Preferences is using to enable/disable the service yet. With each release of OS X more and more stuff is hidden or protected better.

[EntilZha]

I am trying to update/modify this script: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2704889/how-to-start-stop-internet-sharing-using-apple-script. Never used apple script before so its slow going with debugging though

[EntilZha]

This works to turn it on/off:

tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    reveal (pane id "com.apple.preferences.sharing")
end tell

tell application "System Events" to tell process "System Preferences"
    delay 2
    repeat with r in rows of table 1 of scroll area 1 of group 1 of window "Sharing"
        if (value of static text of r as text) starts with "Internet" then
            set sharingBool to value of checkbox of r as boolean
            select r
            if sharingBool is false then click checkbox of r
            #if sharingBool is true then click checkbox of r
        end if
    end repeat
    delay 2

    if (exists sheet 1 of window "Sharing") then
        click button "Start" of sheet 1 of window "Sharing"
    end if

end tell

[EntilZha]

Been using that for a couple days as an Alfred workflow I run when I get to home/work. Works fairly well, its annoying that it actually opens the interface, but not much I can do about that (unless you know how to improve it). I will probably play with the delays and try to decrease them more.

Does ControlPlane support running applescripts as actions? I didn't see anything for that

[krazzer]

Any updates on this? I'm using the Applescript now but it would be awesome if it works like it should.

@EntilZha thanks! Script works great. Also, you can actually run a shell script as action in ControlPlane.

[EntilZha]

So in theory, it would be possible to run a shell script which itself runs the Applescript? The downside of this is that a GUI would be brought up without user interaction which would be annoying (at least for me).

[dustinrue]

I have yet to figure out how to enable internet sharing programmatically.

[mrjcleaver]

Some more options here http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/2488/start-stop-internet-sharing-from-a-script

[dustinrue]

The method described in the first comment is how it works now for the older operating systems. It no longer works in 10.11.

[EntilZha]

@dustinrue, is there anyway to do something low levelish like trace the system calls that the preferences application does while turning sharing on/off?

[dustinrue]

I’ve never found success in doing this, but if someone can demonstrate a reliable way it’d go along ways towards getting this done.

[EntilZha]

Does the interface creation method described here still work? Requires more setup, but it would work

[dustinrue]

@EntilZha too much UI work to implement that to be honest. Would work as a shell script.

[EntilZha]

This definitely seems like unless Apple provides a way to programmatically enable/disable internet sharing it would be hard.

I gave a shot at looking at syscall but hit a brick wall with the new System Integrity/security/above sudo thing on inspecting System Preferences. I could go and disable it in safe mode, try again, but don't have time to try that right now when an Applescript via Alfred works passably well.

[dustinrue]

I'm willing to give it some effort if you show me how you were going about capturing system calls. I have safe mode disabled already for other reasons.

[EntilZha]

I was trying something like this:

cd /Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/MacOS
sudo dtruss System\ Preferences

Which gives an error about it being unreadable (this works fine with regular apps). I also tried running it, getting its PID, then doing something like strace

[drduh]

Hi,

You can disable Internet Sharing in OS X 10.11 with a configuration profile to manage com.apple.MCX forceInternetSharingOff 1. You can find resources online for how to do that.

Alternatively, these commands appear to do the trick, too:

sudo /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Delete NAT:Enabled" /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.nat.plist
sudo /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "add NAT:Enabled integer 0" /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.nat.plist

@EntilZha You can run fs_usage and grep for plist to figure out which preference files are being modified. Also see man -k dtrace for other neat tricks.

[7k50]

I'm also using El Capitan and have this issue.

Did anyone of you find the best way to automate this via ControlPlane?

Is there a shell script available that activates the AppleScript that enables/disables Internet Sharing via the GUI -> System Preferences?