Thursday, October 29, 2015

Dealing with Apple Gatekeeper Unidentified Developer Error when Launching WebEx from Jabber

A couple of weeks ago I noticed that I was receiving the Apple untrusted developer error message (left) whenever I attempted to use the Meet Now functionality directly from Jabber. 




Clicking OK brings another error message and WebEx never loads. I finally got around to trying to fix the issue. This article provides the procedures I used to resolve this issue on my Mac.

Background

I am not sure "when" the problem cropped up nor do I know if it is related to a Jabber upgrade or an upgrade to WebEx Meeting Center. I reload Jabber versions constantly (for testing purposes) and I don't pay close enough attention to MC updates. I know, that isn't helpful but, hey, at least I am honest.

The version info in my scenario:
  • Meeting Center MC30
  • Jabber Version 11.1.0 (221135)
  • OS X Mavericks 10.9.5

The Issue

The issue I experienced occurred one day when I was attempting to initiate my personal meeting room using the "Meet Now" option in my Jabber client. I also ran into the issue when attempting to initiate a conference from a group chat or when attempting to join another user's WebEx conference when prompted that a meeting I was invited to has started.

So, in other words, WebEx functionality from Jabber was completely busted. Which was annoying because I use it regularly. Of course, it wasn't annoying enough to investigate until earlier this week. What can I say, you get busy. 


My Fix

As usual, I should say: YMMV. This is the fix that worked for me. 

The Gatekeeper control mechanism that is blocking this action is documented by Apple in this knowledge base article. This security mechanism is a good thing and while you can turn it off via System Preference, I wouldn't do that. Instead, I prefer to selectively enable specific applications to bypass this security control. 

The trick here is that you have to find the application that Jabber is trying to load. I checked the Applications folder in Finder and I didn't see any WebEx application packages. I also wasn't sure what filename to search for in spotlight, so I didn't bother looking there. 

I am fond of using the Console.app whenever I have application errors like this. I found it to be the easiest way (for me) to finding root cause. The procedure I used:

  1. Make sure you have Jabber loaded and are ready to click the Meet Now button under Meetings
  2. Go to Applications > Utilities > Console
  3. Under System Log Queries select All Messages
  4. Click on the Clear Display toolbar function
  5. In the Jabber application, click on Meet Now
  6. Go back to the Console app and you should see a message from CoreServicesUIAgent that corresponds to the error
  7. This message will point you in the right direction
On my system, the Console message was:


10/27/15 8:23:44.249 PM CoreServicesUIAgent[85730]: File /Users/myuserid/Library/Application Support/WebEx Folder/T30_MC/Meeting 
Center.app/Contents/MacOS/Meeting Center failed on loadCmd /Users/myuserid/Library/Application Support/WebEx Folder/T30_MC/Meeting Center.app/Contents/MacOS/../../../uilib.framework/Versions/A/uilib

My first reaction when I saw the console message was "gotcha". Right behind that was a big "duh", I probably could have guessed the application name if I put 2 seconds into the thought process. Anyway, once you know where the application package is, you can use Finder to navigate to the file. In my case:

/Users/user/Library/Application Support/WebEx Folder/T30_MC/Meeting Center.app

Use Ctrl+Right Click to bring up the context menu and click on Open. You'll receive a different error:



From here, you can click on Open to create an exception for this application. You'll likely receive another message conveying how Meeting Center is launched automatically when you start or join a WebEx meeting. That's cool. We only wanted to add the exception to Gatekeeper. 

Now, whenever I attempt to launch WebEx from Jabber I am taken right into the appropriate meeting room. 

Considerations

I haven't tested this with the latest versions of OS X. I did recently upgrade one of my lab machines to El Capitan, so I'll probably test there to see if the issue is presented on that platform. 

If someone finds out before I do, please post in the comments!




Thanks for reading. If you have time, post a comment!

1 comment:

  1. Thanks! This also works for the "Webex productivity tools" menubar app - only in folder 1524 rather than T30_MC

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