Is softwareupdated stable now?

[dstranathan]

Maybe I'm crazy, be it seems to me that right around macOS 13.4 softwareupdated became more stable. Is it still crashing/hanging on your Macs? How about Sonoma? Did Apple offically address this?

Are we still running launchctl kickstart -k system/com.apple.softwareupdated in a policy these days? Is this still a thing?

[Bol]

@dstranathan Hahaha, I cannot believe I just read this, I was thinking the same thing yesterday!
softwareupdate is so out of fashion I thought, why not throw a remote command at that random machine sitting idle and try again..

How interesting, that worked and smoothly..

softwareupdate --clear-catalog --install "macOS Ventura 13.6-22G120" --restart --verbose

 Best not trust and assume it's a trap! :D

[sdagley]

@dstranathan At least in macOS Ventura (up to, and including, 13.6) that's still a firm no as it's very evident based on posts here and the MacAdmins Slack setting the forceDelayedMajorSoftwareUpdates deferral to prevent upgrades to macOS Sonoma does _not_ work reliably. Hopefully macOS Sonoma will show improvement (or I'm just Charlie Brown being eternally hopeful that Lucy will eventually let me kick the football).

[foobarfoo]

The biggest quality bump for the OS update mechanism seems to have been deployed in Sonoma, but if I'm not mistaken they started to actively address issues in Ventura already. I get the feeling that a large portion of the code has been heavily rewritten to support DDM updates and associated functionality (such as deadline enforcement). It seems like they made the code more predictable, stable and overall better. iOS updates work great on iOS 17, but haven't had a production update for Sonoma yet, so let's see. But I think they share much of the same code base these days, so I'm hopeful. :)

[dstranathan]

Thanks for the feedback. Is anyone still rockin' the Addigy MDM-Watchdog utility in Ventrua or Sonoma?

[calfriday]

Hey! I'm also interested in the MDM-watchdog utility. I want to deploy but haven't found a good Extension Attribute to use so that I can target the repair on affected computers.