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Lots of discussion in #catalina on the MacAdmins Slack on how to disable the above prompt. Turns out even though Catalina isn't a traditional software update, it does still exist as a software update catalog entry and can be ignored in the same way. Run this command to ignore on a single machine...



sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Catalina"



The Catalina banner in Software Update should disappear almost immediately. To send that out to your entire fleet with Jamf Pro, create a new policy with Files and Processes. Under execute command add that command. Scope to whichever Macs you don't want to be prompted. Problem solved! Thanks to folks on MacAdmins Slack for working through this.





To undo what you just did and remove ignored software update entries run...



sudo softwareupdate --reset-ignored



To collect inventory information on what Macs have this ignore software update in place I have an EA. Tested on High Sierra, Mojave, and Catalina. Returns a list of ignored software updates added with the --ignore command. Useful to run advanced searches or smart groups against as needed.



https://github.com/nstrauss/jamf-extension-attributes/blob/master/ignored_softwareupdates.py

@RJH I just got an update from the Apple engineer informing the issue was solved with the Security Update 2020-005 Mojave, however I was not able to install it. After verification it seems it has been pulled back by Apple yesterday due to some major issues (https://mrmacintosh.com/mojave-2020-005-security-update-causing-major-problems-updated/). I reached out to Apple again to get a confirmation and a new timeline for the fix.

https://github.com/hjuutilainen/bigsurblocker may be useful once big-sur drops, when, tho not sure you can avoid nags to install big-sur (instead of catalina) more than 90 days. Details and alternatives are mentioned at github site but Apple does not want to let you delay major os upgrades for than 90 days, and that is for both os-upgrades and security updates.. For our edu folks, it will make sense to stay on 10.14 another year until Fall 2021. So we need ways to reliably block 10.15 or newer as long as possible, and only abandon 10.14 when apple stops issuing security updates for 10.14. The poor ordinary folks without mdm may just need to put up with incessant nagging not only for 10.15 or newer, but also be wary to avoid immediate installs of bricking updates like 2020-005 which took 6 days for Apple to pull. Apple then confusingly later replaces it with identically named but actually a hopefully fixed 2nd version of the 2020-005 update and misnamed "Safari14.0MojaveAuto" train-wreck]

Any fixes for when "sudo softwareupdate --reset-ignored" doesn't actually reset the ignored list?


Having the same problem as @kevin.v. on about half the machines I've tried. I'm trying to reset this for several test machines. I can successfully run the reset command but the update still isn't available (have tried multiple times with restart). I was kind of relying on reversing this for when we make Big Sur generally available. Anyone know of a fix?

We deployed this out to our users to prevent Big Sur from being an option in the System Preferences. This works perfectly fine but this seems to be causing issues when even trying to update from 10.15.1 to 10.15.7. I've tried running the ignore command and running the 10.15.1 to 10.15.7 update, via system preferences but that didnt seem to work either. I've tried NVRAM resets, running the software update via terminal but nothing works.

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