SUS appliance troubles

[Wacochra]

Hello folks,

We're just getting up and running here and one of the last pieces I need to put into place is our SUS solution. We're using the SUS/NetBoot appliance at the moment, but I'm having an issue I'm not sure how to investigate. It seems machines will randomly stop seeing updates available on the SUS, and will report that software is up to date when there are clearly updates waiting for them there (for instance, I have machines sitting at 10.7.3 when 10.7.4 is ready and waiting). If I kill the appliance and start over, things will work for a bit then stop again. I've got only one branch in the SUS, "Root" and "Root Branch" is checked. On the clients, I can see they are pointed properly in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist, and in the SUS I can see that the packages are all enabled (checked).

Any direction on where to start troubleshooting this would be appreciated

[jarednichols]

Are you mirroring the updates on your SUS?

[Wacochra]

I've tried both, I believe, but currently it's set to "Store software updates on this SUS"

[mm2270]

Are you pointing your clients to a full branch URL on your SUS, something like "http://192.168.1.100/content/catalogs/others/index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1_root.sucatalog"?

[Wacochra]

I think so. If I cat /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist, among other things in there I find:

http://asus.our_domain.edu/content/catalogs/index_Root.sucatalog

If I pop that into Safari I get an xml page

[jarednichols]

If you're storing your own updates, have you checked to make sure there's free space in the VM's disk? I've seen other posts where it's run out of disk space before.

[mm2270]

No, that's the generic catalog URL, which will display a page when viewed in a browser, but doesn't work properly with clients. This specifically has to do with Reposado, which is used under the hood on the NetSUS appliance. Apple's SUS can use the generic URL you specified and will work as expected..

See Greg's comment on this thread. He developed Reposado, so he knows best how this works-

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=3973

[ocla__09]

@jarednichols I am using your script to set clients to point to the correct SUS catalog based on OS. It is running correctly, however I am seeing some odd behavior.

After making the defaults write change I verify that the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist file reflects the specific catalog it is supposed to read. However, as soon as I launch software update on a test client, it reports as having no updates available, and when I go back to that plist, the CatalogURL setting has reverted back to something I had set previously. This happens reliably over and over.

Is this something you have seen before?