Our university is in the process of making our Mac OS X installs a little more enterprise-y with AD authentication, management via MCX, centralized software update servers, and Apple Software Updates on a regular basis. In our journey to do the last thing on that list, I looked around to see how others were making it happen.
Plenty of times, I’ve used ARD to force a client to download and install all the updates, but I can’t remember to do that regularly. Moreover, what if installs need a reboot, or really, several reboots – it could be way out of date. How am I to know?
I found this in my search and it is a neat way to solve the problem A script to install all required Software Updates. It’s a bit hacky, but seems like it could do the job. We could also modify the launchd tasks to run a certain times for labs and certain times for staff machines, minimizing user interruption and distributing load on our Apple Software Update servers over several time periods.
While this could work, it’s seems like the solution to only one set of problems. What we need at our university is more of a holistic approach to Mac management. Looking at Munki, we might be able to solve many problems with one solution.