Your running a 10.5 server with (SUS) software update services and you’ve got 10.6 clients on your network. You want to patch your 10.6 clients but they won’t with 10.5 SUS. The Apple solution is to upgrade the server to 10.6 so it can serve 10.6 updates. An alternative solution is to hack the 10.5 SUS. This hack has been taken from a thread from Jan Uschok on the Apple Support Discussion page: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2169042&tstart=15

1: Stop SUS

2: Download http://swscan.apple.com/content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist and copy it to /usr/share/swupd/html/content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist

3: Change it to look like this:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>
<plist version=”1.0″>
<dict>
<key>PrimaryCatalog</key>
<string>http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index.sucatalog</string>
<key>CatalogsList</key>
<array>
<string>http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index.sucatalog</string>
<string>http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog</string>
<string>http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog</string>
</array>
</dict>
</plist>

4: Edit /etc/swupd/swupd.plist and change the metaIndexURL entry to look like this:

<key>metaIndexURL</key>
<string>http://myserver.com:8088/content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist</string>
<key>portToUse</key>

5: Start SUS and wait for it to download the catalog files and to generate the local versions thereof.

6: Once it has generated the local catalog files add some symlinks like this:

cd /usr/share/swupd/html
ln -s /usr/share/swupd/html/content/catalogs/index.sucatalog .
ln -s /usr/share/swupd/html/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog .
ln -s /usr/share/swupd/html/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog .

7: Just in case restart SUS

8: Wait for SUS to download all the updates

9: On your 10.6 client go in the Finder to /Library/Preferences and open com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist. Change the CatalogURL entry to point to http://myserver.com:8088/index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog

10: Launch Software Update on your 10.6 client and be happy

It should behave like a 10.6 server now as it is serving the catalog files according to the 10.6 server documentation as described on page 89 here: http://images.apple.com/server/macosx/docs/System_Imaging_and_SW_Update_Admin_v10.6.pdf