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Comment by joshocar | Hacker News Reader

I work on a ship part of the year. Satellite internet shared between 50 people. These Apple updates would saturate the network and grind it to a halt before we started blocking them on the firewall. iMessage got caught in the crossfire and now sometimes works and sometimes doesn't.

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If you have at least one Mac, you can use Content Caching:

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/what-is-content-cac...

It works for iCloud content, too.

I tried to make that work, but it didn't seem to do anything. Repeat downloads took just as long as before.

you can verify if Content Cache is working in a couple ways... first, while installing the update, you should see a CPU usage spike in Activity Monitor for the process "AssetCache".

secondly, you can run this command on the machine you want to upgrade, to verify that it can see your Content Caching Server (it should report the local IP address of the machine you set up Content Caching on) "AssetCacheLocatorUtil"

great info, thanks.

Looks like if the machine is asleep it won't use it for a content cache, even if "wake for network access" is turned on. So a pretty useless feature if you have a machine that's allowed to sleep.

If you've just turned on Content Caching, or the machine running it has rebooted, client devices will not discover the server immediately. You need to wait a while, or reboot the client devices, which will force them to discover it.

^ This is why you should always be able to turn off automatic downloading of updates.

And you can. Doesn't mean all your users' personal devices comply with the request to do so.

On iOS? iPhones don't update automatically (if you tell them not to), but I'm not aware of a way to stop them from downloading updates, other than weird workarounds like installing a tvOS beta profile.

I forget that perhaps Apple's intent is to do what people complain about: download the update anyway, regardless of the setting. My anecdotal experience (I have yet to have an iOS device actually download the update when I have automatic updates turned off) allows me to forget.

How about silent updates, like the one Apple pushed to remove Zoom's ghost server last year?

Those are non-executable rulesets that are part of XProtect, the system-level antivirus. It’s not an OS update.

Actually, my iphone won't update unless it's being connected via WLAN rather than WWLAN. Makes me kindof of a persona non grata at friends where I have a WLAN password, and the first thing happening if I'm on a visit is that my iphone updates itself. Though it's not as bad as people with Windows notebooks exhausting my mobile plan when they're at my place.

If you're all on the same LAN, then you can configure one device to download it from Apple and share it with the rest.

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