Comment Some thoughts on automatic updates of mac clients (Score 1) 79
Having quite a lot of experience with macs in an enterprise environment, I can assure you:
You do not want your clients to update automatically!
1. When you are responsible that hundreds of persons can work using the clients you are responsible for, you will want to check if an update has any unwanted impact on those clients before you update them.
Maybe you cannot imagine the trouble you get in if one of your major application does no longer work with the newest update that was installed automatically.
If you just for example look at the dependencies between Micorsoft Office 2004 and Mac OS X then you know what I'm talking about.
You will want to test those updates first. Believe me.
2. If you have a lot of clients then you will definitely want to set up your own software update server.
Otherwise your clients will eat away you internet bandwith. Just imagine your 100 clients each downloading that 150MB 10.4.8 update from apple.com. It will block your network for hours...
3. For a method on 'Auto-Update using Apple's Software Update' there's an interesting article here http://macenterprise.org/content/view/198/84/
But you are definitly wrigth. There should be some sort of mechanism so that once set up, a mac client can be forced to update all of its software to the newest releases.
I would also like to see an uninstaller that allows me to uninstall an update that has side-effects...
I don't like to admit it but at this point windows offers better solutions.
You do not want your clients to update automatically!
1. When you are responsible that hundreds of persons can work using the clients you are responsible for, you will want to check if an update has any unwanted impact on those clients before you update them.
Maybe you cannot imagine the trouble you get in if one of your major application does no longer work with the newest update that was installed automatically.
If you just for example look at the dependencies between Micorsoft Office 2004 and Mac OS X then you know what I'm talking about.
You will want to test those updates first. Believe me.
2. If you have a lot of clients then you will definitely want to set up your own software update server.
Otherwise your clients will eat away you internet bandwith. Just imagine your 100 clients each downloading that 150MB 10.4.8 update from apple.com. It will block your network for hours...
3. For a method on 'Auto-Update using Apple's Software Update' there's an interesting article here http://macenterprise.org/content/view/198/84/
But you are definitly wrigth. There should be some sort of mechanism so that once set up, a mac client can be forced to update all of its software to the newest releases.
I would also like to see an uninstaller that allows me to uninstall an update that has side-effects...
I don't like to admit it but at this point windows offers better solutions.
