Using Snow Leopard server for Lion software updates

Here is a step-by-step guide for setting up a Snow Leopard SUS server so that it will distribute Lion updates.

I do not know who originally wrote this article.  If anyone can find the author please let me know and I will credit him/her.


First things first. Fire up Server Admin and stop the Software Update service. Next fire up a Terminal window and head to /etc/swupd.

cd /etc/swupd

Now let's make backups of the .plist and .conf files for swupd.

cp swupd.plist swupd.plist.bak; cp swupd.conf swupd.conf.bak

Great. Now we are going to add a catalog to the catalog array in the swupd.plist. When we are done it will look like this:

otherCatalogs
   
    
       index-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog
       
       index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog
       
       index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog
   
    

You can do this with a text editor, but PlistBuddy makes it easier.


sudo /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c 'add :otherCatalogs:2 string index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog' /etc/swupd/swupd.plist

Will do it in one shot. Adding this catalog is what will tell our SUS Server to go and get the Lion updates.

The next bit we need to do is to tell the server that it can provide this catalog to Lion clients. Open up swupd.conf with the editor of your choice.

vi swupd.conf

Go to the bottom of the file, or just search for Rewrite. Look for the Darwin/11 agent string and change the rewrite rule to look like this.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} Darwin/11
RewriteRule ^/index.sucatalog$ /index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog

Basically we are adding the word "lion" into the sucatalog name.

Now close out of the terminal and start up the Software Update Service with Server Admin again. If you watch the logs, or the updates tab, you will see the Lion updates and on-demand software appear and begin downloading. After a while they will be local and you can start updating those Lion clients!