Armin suggests using SUS Inspector to find the link, but Ryan ( nom de plume Mr. For those of you who use a management platform that requires packages for deployment (e.g., Jamf Pro), grabbing the full ~13 Gb installer already in pkg form is a great option since it is hard to make a package that big yourself. Armin Briegel’s fetch-installer-pkg Python script (which leverages code from Greg’s tool)Īrmin references InstallAssistant in that post.Greg Neagle’s installinstallmacos Python script.The ones that apply to Big Sur and shared Macs are: Armin Briegel describes many of these options in detail in a blog post from November 2020. Which one you use will probably depend on your desired workflow. There are many ways to fetch a full macOS installer these days. So the first step was to reliably download the latest installer for Big Sur. The first piece of wisdom I picked up was that deploying the full installer could be done without requiring a logged in user and would correctly update the system, albeit with a bandwidth penalty (13 GB per station as opposed to 3–4 GB). My scale is such that I could login in to every single computer using an admin account and do this manually, but clearly that doesn’t work for larger deployments, nor does it make it possible to quickly deploy macOS updates that have a security payload. The first roadblock I encountered was that softwareupdate didn’t work with no user logged in, which had been the desired state for running Software Update in the past for my labs. If you are deploying single user computers, there may be some resources here that are useful, but your best strategy is likely to have the user update their Mac using Software Update in the GUI as God Apple intended, supplementing with tooling that reminds the user to do so (such as Nudge) as necessary. Note that this article will focus on how to deploy Big Sur updates on shared use computers, such as computer labs or libraries. This article is meant to gather some of this disparate information in one place to make things easier for your Big Sur (and likely Monterey) deployments. The information I needed to finish my deployments was in bits and pieces all over the place, and I had to learn some things through experimentation. Well, it seems that things are a little more complicated than that. When I read that the biggest problems were fixed in macOS 11.3, I thought I was in the clear since I didn’t start deploying Big Sur in earnest until 11.4. So when I started reading things that suggested that softwareupdate wasn’t working for triggering updates, I wasn’t seeing it because I was still running Catalina. Because Apple’s major OS release schedule does not align with the academic calendar at my University (and most others), I hold off deploying the newest major version of macOS until at least January but more commonly May.
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