Making the most of the Mac Mini for use with the Casper Suite

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MacMini

With the death of the Xserve & subsequent killing off of the MacMini server many Mac Admins have either sought to remove all Apple branded hardware from the server room or have been forced to.

Myself? I now look after a total of 25 Mac Servers, 21 of which are dedicated to our JSS & are installed across 8 different sites globally, some of the challenges of which are touched upon in the JNUC2014 Panel I was on, titled Thinking Big: Scaling JSS Infrastructures for the Mobile Workforce.

The focus of the post below is the Mac Mini’s which are used onsite for Casper Suite Distribution Points, NetBoot Servers & Caching Servers.

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Apple Software Update Server Not Serving Mavericks Updates After Being Upgraded To Mavericks

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After upgrading my Mac servers to 10.9, I found that my 10.9 clients still were not seeing updates served via Apple Software Update Server (read:ASUS).

See below for what the issue was, and the resolution.

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Apple Software Update Server Updates Stuck Waiting

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We cascade  Apple Software Update Server (read: ASUS), from a Master Server on our WAN as per the post here. So once an update is downloaded to the Master ASUS, the Replica’s should just replicate the updates.

This has worked great for a time, but we were missing some updates on a couple of servers. When looking in Server.app at the Software Update service it appeared that the missing updates status was “Waiting…”

Below can be found more details on the issue and the resolution.

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