Hello everyone,
We're running across a very mysterious issue with macOS systems running Monterey. Once in awhile, the Mac will get into a condition where com.apple.softwareupdated either gets corrupted, broken, or gets unregistered completely. These are all Macs connected to our Jamf Pro container.
When the service goes into a problem state, the Software Update GUI spins indefinitely and when we try to run softwareupdate -l in Terminal, we receive an error stating:
The connection to service named com.apple.softwareupdated was invalidated: failed at lookup with error 3 - No such process.
When we try to run sudo launchctl kickstart -k system/com.apple.softwareupdated , we get error:
Could not find service "com.apple.softwareupdated" in domain for system
To verify the service is even installed on the Mac, we run sudo launchctl list | grep com.apple.softwareupdated and it doesn't return anything back. When we run this same command on a Mac where Software Update is still functioning, it returns the service, which is expected.
This has happened to 4 or 5 macOS systems so far running Monterey in our Jamf Pro container and we can't figure out a way to fix it. Upgrading these systems to Ventura is not an option as all systems are hardware that is not eligible for Ventura. The only way we can update these systems with latest patches is by creating bootable USB drives with the patches on them, booting the Mac from the USB drives, and manually updating that way.
Is there any way we can repair/register com.apple.softwareupdated ?
