A couple of weeks ago I had upgraded my personal home computer to the latest MacOS Catalina (10.15) and one of the first issues I ran into was being able to access my vCenter Server. It turned out this was due to changes to MacOS security (which is a good thing) but certainly caught me and others off guard. In fact, I spent quite some time searching online and eventually found this workaround here.

After sharing this tidbit online (which several others also ran into) I came to learn that both Duncan Epping blogged about this issue back in Nov 2019 here and Christian Mohn blogged about this in Dec 2019 here. Sadly I did not come across either of their blogs using "NET::ERR_CERT_REVOKED macos catalina" in Google. I had assumed this was a Chrome issue and simply landed on the first few links and looking back, I now see Duncan's blog was #6 in the search results (doh!)

Today, I ran into another issue when attempting to use the VCSA CLI Installer, the following error was thrown:

“vcsa-deploy.bin” cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified

This is again due to a security change in MacOS Catalina which now prevents terminal-based applications which are not notarized from running. For a single application/binary, you can go into System Preferences->Security & Privacy and allow anyway. For more complex applications like the VCSA CLI Installer which has a number of libraries and scripts, this will take awhile and end up frustrating end users. The updated security enhancement is actually a good thing and I did not want to disable the Gatekeeper service but I was interested in disabling it for the VCSA CLI Installer. While searching online, I came across this Hashicorp Terraform thread where folks were having the exact same issue and I found out there was a way to disable the MacOS Security Gatekeeper for a specific application.

To do so, we just need to recursively remove the metadata attribute "com.apple.quarantine" for the extracted VCSA ISO by running the following command:

sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine VMware-VCSA-all-6.7.0-Update-15132721

After the quarantine attribute has been removed, you can now run the VCSA CLI Installer (including UI Installer) without being prompted with an error. Hopefully VMware will consider notarizing future releases of the VCSA Installer and I will be sharing this feedback internally if it has not already.