Comments on: Software Update Server – using launchd and sed to ensure off-net transfers

By: Brian Blood

Brian Blood — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 14:03:31 +0000

unfortunately, that would have a far more reaching effect (and possible unintended consequences) than the specific instance I need to remedy here.

By: sanderw

sanderw — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 05:56:56 +0000

It’s a little more complex, but this might also be a good candidate for a proxy server. That way you’d have a single place to administer any other hostname swaps you might want/need to do.

By: Brian Blood

Brian Blood — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 02:44:48 +0000

My primary purpose is to not pollute our traffic graphs and billing scripts with traffic that is merely running from one server to another as it’s not traffic that we have to ultimately pay for and bill the client for.

Secondary purpose is to be able to download the updates over a much faster network as most of our client’s colo boxen are only connected via a 10 mbit link whereas the backside is on GigE.

As for your hosts file change, I’d rather not override host names published by other entities.

Having a deterministic way of forcing data traffic to the backside gige network by using slightly altering the existing processes has a much smaller footprint.

By: sanderw

sanderw — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 21:10:56 +0000

Not 100% sure I understand what you’re wanting to do, but couldn’t you just update your /etc/hosts entry (/private/etc/hosts on the Mac, I think) to point to a different IP for swcdn.apple.com?

I guess it depends on if you’d ever want to go to the original address.