Strange SUS issue

[hkabik]

I have 1 machine that when I push a software update command, it is never able to connect. Whether connecting to our internal SUS or to the Apple official SUS it gets the following error:

"Can't load data from the Apple Software Update server."

I have killed cfprefsd, softwareupdate and softwareupdated every time I change the server to either our internal or Apple's but no matter what it stalls out for about 45 minutes and then throws up that error.

Something interesting is that the logs on our SUS show it's immediate connection, then no other interaction.

[23/Mar/2015:07:52:36 -0700] 80 GET "/index-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog" 200 258239 "-" "Software%20Update (unknown version) CFNetwork/720.2.4 Darwin/14.1.0 (x86_64)"

You'll note that the log does not show a machine type which I find interesting, all of our other machine when they connect will have (x86_64) followed by a model identifier, such as:

[20/Mar/2015:19:15:25 -0700] 80 GET "/index-10.10-10.9-mountainlion-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog" 304 - "-" "Software%20Update (unknown version) CFNetwork/673.5 Darwin/13.4.0 (x86_64) (MacBookPro10%2C1)"

The Machine is a MacBook Pro (MacBookPro11,2) running 10.10.2. It is connecting over wi-fi the same as every other machine on the network that is updating normally. Really spinning my gears trying to figure out what's mucking up it's software update service.

It's connecting to a Mac OS 10.8 server (which has been updated to serve out updates up to Yosemite) though I do have a NetSUS I could have it connect to at another site to test. But like I said, I can't even get it to work with Apple's update servers.

Any ideas on what to look at that may be messing with the service?

[hkabik]

Weird... it's actually 3 machines presenting this... out of 25. Two 10.10.2 machines and a 10.9.5. I have other 10.10.2 and 10.9.5 machines accessing updates just fine. Not sure where to even begin here...

[Look]

We get the odd machine with all manner of issues that seem to interfere with updates, generally if the machines have been up for a prolonged period, it usually seems to be caching or temporary files interfering.
Sometimes a restart is sufficient.
Otherwise clearing caches through normal means and restarting usually helps.
Otherwise manually clearing /var/folders and then restarting.

[hkabik]

no go on cache removal and clearing /var/folders>restart. Issue persists. annoyingly.

I had initially suspected it was a permissions issue in /var/folders/zz but everything seemed to check out.