Force OS X Clients to Update & Restart

RE: crontab and AppleScript/Calendar...

Hi,

May I offer a couple alternatives?

Yes, I concur with maflynn, ARD can be used to update and restart other computers on a particular schedule.

And I know that the following suggestion is "old school" (but unlike ARD, it is free), but you could also do the same thing by adding a single line to the crontab file on each machine. Apple's launchd daemon will start the cron daemon if the "crontab" file exists, so you could add a line to crontab to restart the computer say once a week at midnight on Saturday night. See the manpage for details ("man crontab").

A more "Apple" way of doing the same thing is to use AppleScript to write a simple shell script that AppleScript will execute whenever the Calendar app tells it to. Thus AppleScript in conjunction with Calendar (iCal) can also be used to restart any computer on a periodic schedule.

Having said this, most software updates do not require restarts, so your machines may not be the "weeks/months behind in updates" that you think they may be. In fact, those updates that indeed do require restarts, such as new OS kernels, will often schedule a restart of the machine. Only if the user intervenes to cancel the restart will the update not occur.

Good luck,
Switon