JAMF SUS - pulling Apple updates from non-US based Apple servers.

[bbass]

Is there any way to configure the JAMF SUS so that it pulls Apple updates from a country other than the US?

We've chosen to not host the updates on our London-based appliance to make it a more lightweight solution. The obvious answer to this is that we can simply pull the updates ourselves and serve them from the office. However, it would be good to know if there was a switch somewhere to change the "home" country.

[bbass]

A little bit more info here...

One of our admins in the London office said that Apple uses airport codes in order to geographically define where the software updates are originating. In our case, the updates were coming from IAD (Dulles or Northern VA, I suppose).

We have a vanilla (non-JAMF) reposado instance running in our US office and I've looked through the code a little.

In 'reposadocommon.py' there is a spot for CatalogURLs and they are defined as such:

'AppleCatalogURLs': ['http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index.sucatalog',
'http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index-1.sucatalog',
'http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog',
'http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog',
'http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog'],

I've done some searching to see if there were servers like 'http://swscan.apple.co.uk' but that doesn't appear to be the case. My initial thought was to change that in the code and see what happened. No dice.

So I'm still searching for some answers. The next thing would probably to reconfigure a machine and change the 'defaults' back to Apple and then do a little network sniffing. Maybe I could come up with a different URL at that point.

[bentoms]

Hi Brian,

AFAIK, all ASUS servers use the same swscan URL to receive a list of update catalogs

Once they get the catalogs, the downloads are actually downloaded from an akamai system.

They may or may not be location aware.

Also, tbh.. I do not see the physical location making much of a difference.

[bbass]

Thanks, Ben. The updates do come from a CDS. In this case, it's: llnw.net.

So it looks like testing this further we have put this to rest a bit. While one of the machines was pulling from serverx.lcy.llnw.net another one was pulling from serverx.iad.llnw.net.

So there was some funky location-based stuff going on. Further testing, however, showed that the machine that was connecting to the 'iad' server is now pulling from 'lcy'.

In other words, there is nothing to see here. Please move along.

Thanks again for the response.