NetSUS off-network failover to Apple?

capitalize the "u" in "users," maybe…

Nate, I thought of that as well and removed the entry and retried the defaults command with a capital U. In fact, I let auto complete take over when entering the path to the file in in the command to be sure I wasn't fat fingering something. Same results though, Software Update opens, scans the catalog, then vanishes, though still running.
I have been testing this on 10.7.4, so I don't know if that makes a difference., Perhaps an older rev of Lion behaves differently, which I can and will test tomorrow. Other than that, not sure what else it could be.

Thanks.

Mike can you post the defaults command that you are using? Just want to make sure syntax is correct.

[EDIT]

By that, I mean can you post exactly what you are typing in so we can see the branch information. You can make the server portion generic if you need to.

Sure Steve, I had it in my above post, but here it is again for clarity sake:

Curl command used to download local copy of the catalog-

curl http://ip.add.re.ss/content/catalogs/others/index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1_testing.sucatalog > /Users/Shared/index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1_testing.sucatalog

The URL above incidentally is perfectly readable in a browser on my Mac (which is not running the NetSUS), so I can definitely see the catalog file at that address.

Now the defaults command to point my Mac to it-

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL file:///Users/Shared/index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1_testing.sucatalog

I just tried this all again, just to be doubly sure I have done exactly as I'm outlining here. Waited a few minutes and tried Software Update.app again, and no go. Runs, then vanishes. Pretty strange.

The defaults command you had in the previous had the URL I sent in it, which was my branch here, so I just wanted to make sure you weren't making a simple mistake like I would by leaving that in.

I'll do some more testing tomorrow and see what results I get from this.

Thanks, much appreciated. Let me know what you find.

As a last note for today, I just tried all the same on a 10.7.2 MacBook Pro and had the same issue, so older versions of Lion are exhibiting the same behavior for me. I will give this a shot with a 10.6 Mac tomorrow at some point to see if this is an issue with Lion only. It could also be something in our environment, but I can't for the life of me imagine what would cause Software Update to act like that.

I can reproduce the issue of the Software Update window going away mid-run. The fix is to specify the CatalogURL in this format:

file://localhost/path/to/local.sucatalog

and not

file:///path/to/local.sucatalog

/usr/sbin/softwareupdate doesn't seem to care, but the Software Update application does.

@Greg- awesome!! Thank you much for the fix. It does indeed work when specified that way. This is great!