Setup of Apple Software Updates

One of our reasons or rather benefits of brining an OSX Open Directory server into the mix was the ability to have a local Mac Update Server.  Granted it hasn’t been a major issue lately since we added a bunch of bandwidth, but we would prefer to have the ability to hold updates until they are tested (at least minimally) before we push them to our client machines.The configuration of Software Update is very simple, a good resource is the apple KB on Software Update Service Overview.A couple “Got Ya’s”

• I started the service and started downloading the updates, but then realized that our test environment didn’t include the two additional volumes our production machine would include.  The two external FireWire drives are for Storage and for TimeMachine.  I stopped the service and created another folder on the root drive then followed the instructions to store Software Update packages on another hard disk or partition. When I re-enabled the service the downloads continued… to the original location.  I stopped the service and deleted the location as mentioned in the KB article and the Update Service didn’t care much for that it just re-created the folders and continued downloading.So before you start the service, run the command to relocate the downloads.In the production installation I installed the service, but before I started the service I followed the instructions to locate the updates on the Storage volume.To configure our location from a terminal window I ran: sudo ln -s /Volumes/Storage/SoftwareUpdates /usr/share/swupd/html

Note in the Administrators guide on page 85 (Chapter 8 Setting Up Software Update Service) the instructions to delete and/or move the updates and create the symbolic link are not correct.

- the guide displays the first command which is correct: 

   sudo rm -rf /usr/share/swupd/html

- the guide displays the second command to move the files: 

mv /usr/share/swupd/html /new_storage_location 

but the command should be 

sudo mv /usr/share/swupd/html /new_storage_location

- the last command in the guide is: 

ln -s /new_storage_location /usr/share/swupd/html

but the command should be: 

 sudo ln -s /new_storage_location /user/share/swupd/html

• To start the download of updates you click the Update List button.  After that it appears that nothing is happening.  Really the list of updates is downloading… and if you enable Automatically copy __ updates from Apple like I did the updates are downloading too.The icon for each update will be gray, once the update is downloaded it turns blue.  Although none of the buttons are grayed out, clicking on them does nothing since well…. its downloading the updates like you said you wanted it to do.  It would be nice though if the buttons were grayed out or there was a status indicator while it was downloading.I let the download go overnight and by morning it was ready to go.To enable individual software updates, select the checkbox in the Enable column of the update.
• We elected to push the settings out to the client OSX machines by Policy in WorkGroup Manager.  One big Got Ya’ when you choose the preference it says to enter the address including /index.suscatalog when you include that the clients error out.  If you simply use http://servername.domain.org:8088 all works well.