Setting up a Software Update Server

[badkuk]

Hi All,

I apologize in advance if I'm posting on the wrong forum...

Anyways, we 're planning to set up a Software Update Server for the Macs at work. One of our guys tells me that we need to buy some sort of license; the other guy, who actually set up the server, tells me we don't need one. Who's right?

tia

 

[chrfr]

Hi All,

I apologize in advance if I'm posting on the wrong forum...

Anyways, we 're planning to set up a Software Update Server for the Macs at work. One of our guys tells me that we need to buy some sort of license; the other guy, who actually set up the server, tells me we don't need one. Who's right?

tia

The ability to use a Software Update Server ended with macOS Catalina. Big Sur and Monterey will only pull their updates from Apple directly, so don’t bother trying to get this to work now as Catalina will only get a few more months of updates. (The product that does this is free and open source: https://github.com/wdas/reposado
You can set up a caching server which will allow a local computer on your network to hold copies of updates from Apple but you cannot manage which updates your computers see. This is built into all recent versions of macOS.

Intro to content caching

Content caching is a service in macOS that speeds up downloading of software distributed by Apple.

support.apple.com