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I'm having a problem with Casper's built in Software Update Server setup. I want clients to use the full URL pointing directly to the catalog of our software update server (http://software.server.edu:8088/index-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog) instead of pointing to the index file (http://software.server.edu:8088/index.sucatalog). We've been having serious slow-downs using our software update server and my Apple SE informed me that pointing our clients to the full path would help solve this issue. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to do this in the server setup portion of our JSS. Any ideas or recommendations? We are currently on version 8.52.



I read somewhere that using MCX settings or a script to make these changes is the only way to do this. I would hope that this change could be set in the server setup within the JSS.

You could always do this using a bash script deployed with a policy.



#!/bin/sh

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL http://software.server.edu:8088/index-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog

Unfortunately there is no way to define a full OS specific URL in the Servers section of your JSS. At least not that I know of. So MCX or policy + script will be your only options.



There's a small gotcha here to watch out for though. Make sure once you start deploying the setting via policy that you disable anything in the management framework, for example, in your Network Segments, that would be applying the regular "index.html" SUS address as the default Software Update server. If you have it enabled there, it will keep overriding changes made via scripts when the Macs pull down management framework settings.

Any news on if JAMF will offer this in new releases or is this a feature request I should add?



Thanks to both of you who responded. Those two options were going to be my backup plan.

Well, just taking a wild guess here, but since we've seen that version 9 of Casper Suite will integrate nicely with their NetSUS appliance, rechristened as the JDS (JAMF Distribution Server), which also requires the longer OS specific URLs, I'm going to assume there may be better ways to apply a SUS to the management framework. I can't imagine we'll still need to use policies and scripts to set this once that's out.



Edit: No harm in creating a Feature Request for it though.

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