Snow Leopard™ Server

Chapter 37. Software Update Server

In This Chapter

• Introduction to Software

• Update Server

• Planning Software

• Update services

• Software Update Server

• setup and configuration

• Managing

• and monitoring

• Software Update Server

Apple's Software Update service in Mac OS X enables users to download secure updates from Apple as they're released. However, the size of these updates and their potential impact on organizations that manage large numbers of Macs have resulted in the need for Software Update Server, a locally run service that caches downloaded updates and enables administrators to selectively roll out approved update packages to their users.

Once activated, Software Update Server communicates with Apple's update service to obtain new update listings as they become available and downloads the packages to the server.

The service can be used to download all updates and make them immediately available to users on the local network to prevent each client computer from having to download the same update files directly. That helps to conserve Internet bandwidth.

Administrators might also want to prevent users from installing any updates before they've been tested against the system configurations and software in use locally. Software Update Server can present a listing of available updates and enable administrators to selectively choose which updates users see when they perform an update.

For this to work, users' computers need to be configured to use the local Software Update Server instead of contacting ...