Run your own Software Update Server with Reposado

Apple systems administrators can now use non-Apple hardware to host an internal Apple Software Update Service, thanks to Reposado, an open-source project developed by IT admins at Walt Disney Animation Studios.

Running your own Software Update Server allows you to test updates for hardware and software conflicts before deploying them across all your machines. It also allows you to economize on bandwidth, downloading each update just once instead of having everyone in the company download it separately.

Until now, you've needed to run such a server exclusively on Apple hardware running Mac OS X Server. Now, Disney Animation Studios' Reposado lets you run your Update Server on any hardware and software server you like.

Reposado downloads Apple's Software Update catalogs and even the update packages from Apple's servers. Written in Python, the software hosts the updates using the 'curl' binary tool and a web server like Apache 2. You can setup custom branches to organize updates and keep track of those that passed testing. If you work in a mixed environment with some machines running 10.6.7 and others on an older version of OS x, you can also use Reposado to serve different updates to different machines.

[via Managing OS X]