Mass/Varying Software Updates

S

sammond7

Registered
Hi Everyone,

I am in a workplace with 40+ Macs (varying in OS and set up). I don't like downloading the software updates on every single machine individually as it uses up valuable bandwidth and time.

Is there any way to easily locate the required updates for each group of similar machines and download them only once??

I used to manually search the Apple download pages but this is becoming more difficult. I also tried downloading the packages on one machine but then they don't work on the others!?

Any suggestions?

Cheers!
 
Hello,
Do you use Apple Remote Desktop at all? It would certainly make life easier if you are dealing with OSX machines, even with varying versions. We use two methods with ARD. The first is simply selecting the computer list, we do this by location, and sending a Unix command of SoftwareUpdate -ai which installs all updates avaiable. You can vary the command to only list what is available or install only reccomended updates. The other method is downloading the specific package and copying it out through ARD, though this requires some interaction on the other end or through remote control.
I hope this helps, might be old news!
 
Thanks for the tip - i actually completely forgot ARD existed but will start having a play with it monday! Cheers :)
 
How about going a step further - installing a cron job on each client machine to do a "/usr/sbin/SoftwareUpdate -ai" every Sunday at 3am or something?
 
I'm not up to speed with setting up cron jobs etc. Just wondering tho, do both these solutions (ARD and Cron) involve downloading the same updates from Apple to each individual machine therefore not alleviating the repeated downloads of the same file?
 
Good point. My machines are all up to date so I can't try this out, but maybe you could combine the following. Your "Master machine" would get the updated packages from the Apple servers, and then your "client machines" would get them from tha master and install them:

Master machine: softwareupdate -d to download the packages, then copy them to a shared directory or webserver directory

"Master and client machines": softwareupdate -i -u http://mastermachine/some_file

It would take some scripting, but it might allow you to download only once.... There's also the major caveat that every client machine would need to be running the same version of the operating system, and have the same processor type. Downloading the PPC updates wouldn't help an Intel client machine.
 
A friend of mine has been playing around with OS X server for the bunch of Mac Pro he admins, and he managed to set up his own Software updater server on the master machine, so when the machines updated, they get the files from there not from the web. So if you have OS X server for the master machine you can have a go.
 
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