macOS enrollment stuck for hours turns out it wasn’t the networkSolved

Participant
Discussion
2 months ago Nov 09, 2025

Enrollment on a MacBook keeps getting stuck in a strange loop.
Profile installation starts, then just… waits. Sometimes an hour, sometimes five. Eventually it moves forward on its own. Sometimes it throws a vague “network connection lost” message. What’s odd is that normal browsing works fine. We’ve tried office Wi-Fi, home Wi-Fi, even a mobile hotspot. Same behavior every time.
This isn’t ABM-based enrollment; either it fails right at the sign-in enrollment stage.

At this point, we’re out of obvious things to check.

Replies (3)

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Participant
2 months ago Nov 09, 2025
Marked SolutionPending Review

That’s a tricky one because everything you’d normally suspect points to the network, but if it works everywhere else, that theory starts to fall apart.

I’ve seen macOS enrollment behave like this when something subtle breaks the secure handshake. The process doesn’t always fail fast; it just waits until it times out or retries enough time to continue. Makes it look like it’s “hung” when it’s stuck retrying something in the background.

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Participant
2 months ago Nov 09, 2025
Marked SolutionPending Review

We ran into this exact scenario recently, and the root cause surprised us: the Mac’s system clock was out of sync.

Because the system time didn’t match Apple’s time servers, SSL certificate validation failed silently during the MDM handshake. That’s why browsing still worked, but enrollment didn’t.

What fixed it for us:

  • Sync the system time from Terminal:
    sudo sntp -ss time.apple.com
  • Remove any existing MDM / Hexnode profiles
  • Reinstall the enrollment profile

Once the clock was corrected, enrollment was completed almost immediately.

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Participant
2 months ago Nov 09, 2025
Marked SolutionPending Review

We never thought about checking the system time because the device looked normal. Synced the clock, cleaned up the old profiles, re-ran enrollment, and it went through without a hitch. Good reminder that when macOS enrollment stalls for no obvious reason, it’s not always the network doing the damage.

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