I’ve been traveling a bit recently and have been reading about the latest 10.6.2 and Safari 4.0.4 Updates, but being away from my OS X Server with the Update Server I haven’t been able to apply the updates. Back at home this evening with a (tiny) bit of downtime I thought I’d take the opportunity to update the MacBook Pro.
So I fire up Software Update and it claims that there are no updates available. WTF?
I go to the server and verify that the updates are actually in the list of downloaded updates. Yes. Safari 4.0.4., 10.6.2.
So I check that I’m still pointing to the correct server in the Managed Preferences (/Library/Managed\ Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist). Yes.
Pulling out the URL from the plist I load it up in Safari to see what the server is sending to me as a catalog of available updates and find the following entries for Safari:
Size31324160URL
Size37979594URL
Where’s my Snow Leopard entry? A little googling along to find this article, which points out that if you have a Snow Leopard client you need a different URL to the Software Update Server. Hmmm - strange, but I guess if you were a full time administrator you’d be up on this kind of thing. I haven’t yet tested what happens if you plug in ‘HTTP_URL_FOR_CATALOG’ into the Workgroup Manager though. I just went with the ‘index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog’ since all local machines in the home group have been updated to Snow Leopard (thanks to the Family Pack).
So I plug in the new value in the Workgroup Manager and remember that I had been fighting this issue earlier for refreshing Managed Preferences without restarting or relogging in, but that I’m now in a newer version. Apple has answered my prayers with the very simple, very useful and exceedingly uncomplicated mcxrefresh command in 10.6. One shot, and sure enough, Software Update now tells my I should be updating to 10.6.2. Safari 4.0.4 is not in the list at the moment, but Software Update might be trying to isolate big system updates from other ones.