MacOpinion: OS X Part 7: Another Thing Wrong — Upgrades. But the thing which really annoys me about the whole process is that there is no easy way to get the latest update once to update several machines.
This is simply not true. After you download and install something, but before you quit or reboot, select the program you just installed and choose Save as…
from the menu. It will save it as a regular installer that you can run on other machines. Be sure to keep track of whether a reboot it required afterwards; Software Update will tell you this, but the individually saved installers will not.
Later: Daniel Berlinger asks Why can’t I set up one machine as the “local master” and have all the other machines check that machine for updates?
Good question. Does anyone know if this has been done? You’d need to reverse-engineer the information sent over the wire, hack each client to point it to your local server, and set up some sort of proxy on your server to download all possible updates and then sort out which ones were relevant to each client. Probably too much work for a third party, but maybe Apple could work out the details and roll it into a future version of Mac OS X Server. It would certainly be an “enterprise” selling point.
