Pushing Updates to clients?

[JGruber]

Ok, so the upcoming school year just got a nice new XServe, with all the bells and whistles, so we decided to turn on the Update Service, on our first iMac in our lab, we are able to update from that server without any problems, and it's very fast as well. However, we have 50 iMacs that are going to be re-imaged from our first iMac.

I want to know if we are able to set a specific time for the iMac's to check for updates, and install them automatically, in stead of going to each one and doing a Software Update.

We do this all time with our 1500+ Dells, and AD and GP, and just wanted to know if this is possible to do on the Macs.

 

[TK2K]

Ok, so the upcoming school year just got a nice new XServe, with all the bells and whistles, so we decided to turn on the Update Service, on our first iMac in our lab, we are able to update from that server without any problems, and it's very fast as well. However, we have 50 iMacs that are going to be re-imaged from our first iMac.

I want to know if we are able to set a specific time for the iMac's to check for updates, and install them automatically, in stead of going to each one and doing a Software Update.

We do this all time with our 1500+ Dells, and AD and GP, and just wanted to know if this is possible to do on the Macs.

best way to do this is through ARD where you can send packages to the computers to be installed (so you only use the internet bandwidth once, on the host computer) and do it that way

 

[belvdr]

Take a look here:

http://archive.macenterprise.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=198&Itemid=84

It's a cron script you can have run on each machine whenever you like.

 

[TK2K]

Take a look here:

http://archive.macenterprise.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=198&Itemid=84

It's a cron script you can have run on each machine whenever you like.

or that, the advantage of ARD is simply that it's GUi based and easy to configure, but if you're fine with scripting more power to you

 

[belvdr]

Does ARD allow you to schedule these automatically at a certain time, without the need to visit the machine each time to update? I wasn't sure of that.

 

[JGruber]

I don't think it does. You would still need to run ARD to get the updates pushed to the clients. Also my Update server has all the updates downloaded already, I would hate to connect to each machine and push out multiple updates at a time.

The simplest way I think would work is to have it update at a given time. I'll fire up my Mac Pro and try this cron script.

 

[m4v1s]

The easiest way to do this would be to make sure that the software update server is set to your internal server

defaults write com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL "http://yoursus:8088/"

and then use the command line version of softwareupdate to run the updates whenever they are available.

softwareupdate -ia

this will install all available updates from your internal update server. This command can be sent from ARD, SSH or scheduled via a cron job. It must be run as an admin user or it will fail.