Mojave Server.app Software Update Services

[ladygreyjedi]

Over the last few months, Ive been trying to completely redo our Mac OS management in my organization, as its been very piecemeal. This has been building the architecture for JSS, Patches, and MacOS updates. We are a unique environment where we have several remote locations that run primarily over satellite. I was going to have a primary MacOS server Software Update server at our primary location, which would replicate to the remote locations.

Unfortunately I found out (the hard way after update) that it looks like Apple has discontinued the Software Update service with the Mojave Server.app update. So now I'm trying to figure out how to move forward.

Does anyone have any recommendations/answers to the following questions?

1. Is there another way to active software update services?
2. Has MacOS updates been bundled into the Content Caching services?
3. If Apple has dumped SUS completely, what is recommended for an Alternative Solution?

[sdagley]

@smithyincucf Jamf's NetSUS is a great replacement for Apple's SUS feature. It comes as an installer you can run on a Linux system, or a .ova file to spin up a VM. NetSUS is actually a wrapper around Reposado and a few other tools, but makes for a much more simple installation. The only caveat is Jamf keeps saying 500GB is required for installation, but the reality is 1GB or more is needed.

[benducklow]

NetSUS isn't fully supported either by Jamf, but rather a 'best effort'. Thus the reason we haven't dug further into it.

[sdagley]

@benducklow Have you found any other SUS replacement besides Reposado? While Jamf may not support NetSUS, it just re-packages Reposado which also isn't directly supported, but seems to have an active community, and I believe is the only game in town for a SUS replacement.

[benducklow]

@sdagley Nope. If its not supported by Jamf, we typically don't implement it. I hope with the recent acquisition like NoMAD, its a sign of some (good) things to come from my perspective. I just wish they'd 'scoop' up all these little tools that people have come up with and roll them into their product portfolio!

[sdagley]

@benducklow The problem with SUS in general and expecting anyone to "support" it is that Apple has been saying for years it's deprecated. Caching Service is supposed to be the way of the future, but without the ability to easily control what updates are enabled it's a far cry from a replacement for SUS. That Apple themselves still use it for the softwareupdate tool makes the current status of SUS especially annoying.

[ravisgupta]

@sdagley - can you please help on it would take about 1 GB instead of 500 as moment i clicked on manual sync its pulling all the updates even after choosing 10.14 only, can you help me limit that before i can even create a branch.

[ryan_ball]

High Sierra/Mojave Content Caching does cache Apple Software Updates (10.13.5 and later).
Source

[sdagley]

@ravisgupta Sorry, my only advice would be to shut down your NetSUS VM, increase the storage allocation, and try again.

[ryan_ball]

Look in the storage section of NetSUS, see if it shows you are out of disk space.

[ravisgupta]

@sdagley- I got the disk space & checked on slack as well, looks like there is no way to stop it from syncing & pull all the updates unless there is one .. i just need for Mojave & High Sierra :)
I selected only 10.14 Mojave before running the manual sync.

[thetfordb]

@ravisgupta I had a lot of trouble my first few weeks with NetSUS. Even thought I had told it to not download the updates, it did. Eventually the setting did apply and it now only downloads the catalogs. We have ~1GB of usage rather than 495GB. I'm not sure what made it work finally.

[k3vmo]

Since I'm STUCK without NetSUS (or any alternative) running yet - Can I just put a 10.13 box online with content caching turned on? Will it start to pull a copy of avaiable updates if they're already installed?