Blocking OS Notifications

[mconners]

Hi Folks,

I have seen a lot of posts about blocking the App Store and so forth. I am looking for a sure fire way to disable the red badge and notification for OS updates.

We manage the deployment of these updates and too often, a user will try to update on their own and this causes issues with compatibility as we haven't fully vetted the new release.

Because we manage these updates, I also need to be able to run remote commands for deploying these updates so I don't want to use an ignore command as this could potentially hide on the system, a critical update.

[Anonymous]

@mconners the best way I've seen to handle this (on the Macs) is to deploy a policy that runs/enforces the software update --ignore "macOS Big Sur" or whatever update you want blocked specifically. I usually couple this with the software restrictions to be sure its not run. unfortunately thats been the only surefire way I've gotten it to turn off the notification without completely disabling the notifications system(which keeps turning back on).

[mconners]

Thank you @Npotter229 I appreciate this response. I haven't played around with the ignore switch in a while. I will dig into this. It's too bad since this is a notification thing, that we don't have a notifications configuration profile that can be configured.

[PhilS]

On my Mac running 10.15.7 I ran sudo softwareupdate --list to get the actual label to ignore...and it came back with "No new software available." (That's been my experience before, that softwareupdate looks only within the current major version.) But nevertheless sudo softwareupdate --ignore "macOS Big Sur" works!
I haven't played with this at all before. @Npotter229 what's the downside?