Sodium WishList - Apple Products - Updates and More
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As it is now, to bulk push updates out to apple products we're stuck using Apple's Remote desktop, which utterly sucks.
We have the option to copy applications (updates or downgrades) over an existing application, to install packages and to run Unix commands.
Which, while functional, means we have to manually sit there and watch as updates go along, and repush, reboot, troubleshoot failures.
This is the context menu of Apple's Remote Desktop
http://i.imgur.com/4v8ntYh.png
Those buttons there in the middle copy, install, and unix, that is what we're forced to use to push updates. It's slow, it's tiresome and generally just sucks.
Some kind of call to check if individual applications are out of date to salt based on what is installed, and then pull down updated applications per system would be tits. The OS updates require us to reboot the equipment, so some time of scheduling there would be great as well.
Also a check that no one is logged into the system before doing any updates is a critical item, we don't want people losing hours of rendering time because they didn't let us know. If there was a way to move updates to a different time for individual or (bulk devices) would be great
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On the bit about moving the updates, if the system determines a user is logged in, an email summary of systems that "failed" updates would be great as well.
IE: Sodium determines someone is logged in, skips that system for updates that evening, creates a summary email of success/failures and that would go to the IT department.
We then schedule updates with the employee, or force a reboot if they are more than so many days or weeks behind on updates. Updates get installed and IT doesn't have to deal with "I can't work right now because I'm out of date in the middle of the day"
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@dustinb3403 Until sodium gets the ability to deploy packages, you could maybe try to test Munki + AutoPkg. Reading their product descriptions, it seems they could work for you.
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And a few picks:
https://blog.vandenbrand.org/2016/01/04/how-to-automate-your-mac-os-x-setup-with-ansible/
http://www.nickhammond.com/automating-application-installs-with-ansible-on-osx/
https://daemonza.github.io/2017/03/06/using-ansible-to-automate-my-macbook-setup/Basically Ansible with Homebrew.
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Do reboots have to happen at the time of update? Or can they wait? Any reason to delay updates rather than just delaying the reboot?
