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I recently bought a new macbook pro with Lion, had some problems and had it checked by Apple people. It was returned to me but the software update server seems to have been changed and will not update. How can I change to the official one? I would like to avoid the 2 hour drive. Thanks!!

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Im wondering the same thing. we will never now the dragons lair on the keep. – user18761 Feb 15 '12 at 8:37

migrated from serverfault.com Oct 25 '11 at 3:06

2 Answers

up vote 7 down vote

It depends on exactly how they changed the update server setting. If they did the obvious thing, this should delete the setting (so it'll go back to normal):

sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL

If that doesn't work, it's possible it's configured as a per-user (rather than system-wide) setting, in which case this should do it:

defaults delete com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL
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up vote 0 down vote

Before driving to the Apple technician, you can type the following Terminal command:

defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL

This will tell the the URL that SoftwareUpdate is checking.

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Would you be willing to expand slightly on this? We are looking for good, in-depth answers. Perhaps you could include the steps needed to get to this point? – bassplayer7 Feb 22 at 1:53
On OS X 10.8.2, when testing the above answer, I get this error: The domain/default pair of (/Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate, CatalogURL) does not exist – gosmond Feb 22 at 4:39
@gosmond: that means that your computer will use the default -- Apple's servers. – Gordon Davisson Feb 22 at 5:34
@GordonDavisson, OK, then machead should make that clear in the answer, so that people who try the command aren't left scratching their heads by an apparent "error" in the output. – gosmond Feb 22 at 6:59

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