We just recently added a handful of Macs to our BES Deployment. I noticed that none of the OSX updates are rated with a source severity. We find these rankings extremely helpful for Windows patches. I understand that BigFix just takes the rankings from Microsoft and that Apple doesn’t really have comparable rankings, but it would be nice if BigFix could distinguish the updates that are security related vs the non-security related updates. Is there anyway BigFix can add something like this?
I also noticed that there are no patches for the Mac OSX Server OS. We have one Mac OSX server version 10.5.4, which has no relevant fixlets. Not even the BES Client upgrade fixlet was relevant, I had to upgrade the BES Client manually. Does BigFix not support this OS, or is this an oversight in the relevance?
This is still an issue, a year and a half later. We have over 2000 Macs, but this is not very useful. Instead, we use a local Apple Software Update Server. We cannot depend on BigFix for Mac support at this time.
FYI, I contacted support about this a while ago. There response was that Apple doesn’t rank the security patches in the same way Microsoft does. We ended up using the Category field to narrow down imortant patches to the ones that are in the “Security Update” category. As for OSX Server, they said they don’t support it but the client will run on it and the fixlets wont work.
We only have about 5 macs and one osx server so it isn’t a major issue for us. For us at least, the Category field does help.