The Software Update Service has shipped with Apple’s Server product for quite some time, which allows admins to download and approve patches for Macs with little customizability or granularity. An anti-feature is its limited support for previous OS’s, along with the fact you need to stay on the upgrade treadmill to serve updates to the newest version of an OS when it’s released. You also can’t hold on to ‘deprecated’ patches, nor release updates to a test group first, which is… similarly limiting. An open source project called Reposado and supplementary projects to manage it have been released, which take advantage of the simplicity of how the service actually works under the covers. JAMF has even packaged up an appliance to load into your virtualization platform of choice and host updates from.
Key Concepts:
We’ll look at what the Reposado project was designed to achieve, and how it works. Then we’ll veer off into companion products like Margarita and the encapsulation of the project in JAMF’s NetSUS appliance. Comparison with and contrast to the Caching Service built into Server.app 2.2+ will also be discussed. DNS hijacking for CDN redirects and .htaccess trickery will also be discussed and demonstrated.
Foundational Lecture – 75 Minutes
Allister Banks, Emerging Health IT
Allister is excitable, adept at nerd sniping, and hails from NY. He contributes to various open source projects and speaks enough Japanese to order food. Links to his online presence can be found at http://aru-b.com. You should follow him on twitter, @sacrilicious