Digital Preservation: Building a Software Update Server Mirror for PowerPC Macs

[jeffburg]

Hey folks, this might be a little off-topic. But since we are all interested in Digital Preservation, I thought you might be interested.

If you didn't know, Apple shut off the Software Update Servers for Mac OS X 10.0 through 10.3. Luckily the servers for 10.4 and above still work. But I am worried those may be shut off as part of the TLS Apocalypse. For that reason, this week I went through the process of figuring out how to mirror the Software Update servers for 10.4 through 10.10. I am happy to say it works and I only had to sacrifice 272GB on my Server

I created a guide on how to create your own mirror if you are interested

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

[MindWalker]

Wow, this is neat! I might need to experiment with this at some point.

Just some months ago I was either updating an old Mac, or playing around with an old OS X Server 10.5 or something, and I was wondering how long these update servers might still be going, and whether the updates are archived in any shape or form. I did grab some updates manually (by copying them from the updater's cache directory before they were installed) but this looks much nicer solution.

Do you know when the 10.0-10.3 update servers were taken out?

[jeffburg]

Thats a good question. I honestly don't. I assume it was around 2010 or so. But my guess is as good as ChatGPT's lol

[ptek]

I hope they don't do that to their Mac OS X Server source code as well :/ There is quite a bit of Objective C in there.