Hi all, I’m hitting a wall with our managed macOS fleet. We use Hexnode to manage about 50 MacBook Pros. I’ve confirmed that AirDrop is enabled in the Advanced Restrictions section of our policy, but for some reason, these Macs cannot receive files.
My users can send files from their managed Macs to unmanaged devices perfectly fine, but the managed Macs never show up as an available destination for anyone else. Any ideas on what I might be missing in the policy?
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@desmond , Have you checked the local discovery settings on the Macs themselves? Sometimes even with the policy applied, the OS defaults to “No One”.
Try going to “Control Center” at the top right corner of your device and enabling “AirDrop”. Also make sure that the visibility is set to “Everyone”. I had a similar issue last month and toggling that manually on the device fixed it for us.
Thanks for the suggestion, @eduardo . I just tried that on two test machines: manually set them to “Everyone” and even toggled Bluetooth off and on. Unfortunately, they still aren’t appearing on the network as recipients. It seems like the receiving side of AirDrop is still being blocked somewhere.
While the Advanced Restrictions policy ensures the AirDrop feature isn’t blocked by the Hexnode, the discovery mechanism relies on a specific network protocol to function.
The reason you can send but not receive is likely due to the Bonjour (Multicast DNS) service being filtered or disabled on the managed devices. For a Mac to be seen by others, it must be able to multicast its presence over the network.
To fix this, please follow these steps:
mDNSResponder) with the new network permissions.Once Bonjour Multicast is active, your managed Macs should be able to announce themselves and appear as recipients in the AirDrop menu.
Regards,
Elle Reed,
Hexnode UEM.
That was exactly what was missing, @elle_reed !
I hadn’t initially enabled the “Bonjour Multicast” setting in our macOS policy, as I assumed the Advanced Restrictions toggle covered all of AirDrop’s functionality. After following your steps, the managed Macs are finally appearing as available recipients.
Everything is working perfectly now. Thanks for the solution!
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