[tech] [wheel] Fwd: [Tech-contacts] Apple Software Update Server

[David Adam]

On Fri, 13 Jun 2008, James French wrote:

> I have set this up on Apollo and Arctic. Although we rarely get the traffic
> from non-free sites, just guarantees that the updates will always come down at
> a sensible rate.
> 
> Fwiw I also set up the software update server and know it's not doing anything
> crazy... well, anything crazy for OS X server, which is to say, lots of things
> crazy.

Funnily enough I was just thinking about Apple system updates today. We 
have automatic updates enabled on all the Windows machines (or we should 
have), phonehome for the Debian boxes, pkg-update-watch for the CSW stuff 
on Solaris...

softwareupdate(8) on Mac OS X is a bit underpowered, but something like 
the script below might be useful. Alternatively, have any of the 
Mac-heads on the list got a better suggestion for keeping track of 
software updates on our two Macs? We could just cron 'softwareupdate -i 
--all && reboot' but that seems a bit dangerous.

I guess we could always port Phonehome...

David Adam
UCC Wheel Member
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au

---

#! /bin/sh
OUTPUT=`softwareupdate -l`
if (echo $OUTPUT | grep "found the following new or updated software"); 
then mail -s "Software updates available on $HOST" root at ucc <<EOF
$OUTPUT
EOF
fi