It seems that my Uni has not yet updated their SWupdate server from Leopard to Snow Leopard yet.
As I am now on SL and trying to get SUE to work. There is a fault in that if the .sucatalog cannot be found on the server for the CLIENTS OS then the message is not updated on the UI – hence the look of a hang.

As a test I added the index.sucatalog to the 10.6 catalog plist and it found the server and the catalog file straight away.
NOTE : THIS is not a fix as I pointed 10.6 at a 10.5 SWupdate server and so no updates were available, it was just an excercise in finding out what the hang in the UI was caused by.

Hope this Helps Andrew fix this minor annoyance to some.

Thanks to Andrew For all his hard work on making many of our lives simpler

Kieren

Nice piece of detective work, by the way. Handy to know.

To anyone stuck at “verifying” or finding “Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /var/db/swupd/html/index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog” in their server log.

Your update server has probably not finished downloading updates. It will not start responding till it has done that – which takes a day or so depending on the speed of your connection. Be patient. If you do see the above message in your log it most likely means your request is getting to the server (look at the source IP), but the server is saying – go away, I am not ready yet.

Overall the process is:
1 Enable software update server in server admin.
2 In the software update settings tab – typically – tick the boxes for
Enable all new updates from Apple
Automatically enable copied updates
Delete outdated software updates
3 Start the server
4 Wait till the update server has completed downloading the available updates. You can check progress under the updates and info tabs. My current updates folder sits at about 17gb, so expact to wait for a day or so.
5 When downloading is complete you should be able to connect to your server at http://YourServerName.WhateverExtension:8088/ (just like in the example.

Not everyone is an IT specialist, with many people setting up a server for home or small office use. One thing they often miss is that you can connect to your server at:
Its local address – for example if your server is called “myserver” then connect to http://myserver.local:8088/ If you are not sure what your server’s local name is you will see it at the top of the Overview tab in server admin.
It’s IP number – for example if your server’s IP is 10.0.0.10 then connect to http://10.0.0.10:8088/

Once again thanks for a great piece of software – it lets anyone carry out the task without recourse to the terminal.

“Symbolic link not allowed or link target not accessible: /var/db/swupd/html/index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog”

when I run the app on MacBook Pro I get a box that says My Software is Up To Date, but under that window is another window that can not be clicked on that says Show Details, Not Now and Install.

I am running Snow Leopard on the MacBook Pro and Snow Leopard Server.

So what is going on then …..

Cheers

PS : nice work for this app

Being stuck at the “verifying server” stage probably indicates a firewall issue being unable to connect to the server while it waits for NSURLRequest to timeout. There should be a timeout of 5 seconds per request, but we try port 8088 and 80 for each of a number of different catalogs per OS release.

(I’m stuck on ‘Verifying Server…” and spinning worm wheel thing).