Notices by Jeffrey Bergier (jeff@jeffburg.social)

I am trying to create a mirror (for myself) for Apple's software update server for Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5, 10.6 because I am worried these will get shutdown. The servers for 10.3, 10.2, 10.1, 10.0 are already gone so they can't be saved.

I spent so much time messing around with UTM/QEMU to get 10.5 or 10.6 server up and running and its just so hard. Then I did it in VMWare Fusion on my last Intel Mac and it all worked like a dream. We really lost something in the switch to Apple Silicon when it comes to old Mac preservation…

But anyway, turns out that the software update server in 10.6 server can't connect to Apple anyway. So this method is not going to work anyway 😭

I will have to try this OSS project and see if I can get it to work. Of course if anyone knows of an existing mirror or Archive.org link please send it... but yeah, it would be a shame to lose these update servers.

https://github.com/wdas/reposado/blob/main/docs/getting_started.md

Well, I am about to give up on this Apple Software Update Server mirror. I have spent so long troubleshooting. I thought everything was working... 10.6 Server was dutifully syncing and downloading all the updates. But its just not downloading about 1/3 of them.

ChatGPT says the cryptic error "Product file URL contains possible security violation" is because the Apple SUS has cryptic rules about how the URL is named. The URL's are all good but its not even trying to download them :-/

I might try again with Reposado, but it basically means starting over 😭

https://github.com/wdas/reposado/blob/main/docs/getting_started.md

In the screenshots, the one showing the updates shows the exclamation marks next to the items that got this weird security error. The other shows a 10.5 Leopard VM checking for software updates from my SUS that works but fails to be find any compatible updates :-/

All right folks. It took a while to get the guide up, but I finally finished creating my Apple Software Update mirror for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger through 10.10 Yosemite. It takes about 300GB and is just flat files hosted by Apache. I want to shout out an open source project I used called Reposado that does all the heavy lifting of creating the mirror.

I created a guide for others to use. If you are like me and worried that one day Apple will shut off the Software Update Servers for our favorite PowerPC Macs, then you might want to get this up and running now before that happens.

https://github.com/jeffreybergier/Retro-Software-Update-Server