Making Software Update your bitch

One of the frequent problems I have with Software Update is the quaint notion that a 32M download never chokes. Instead of breaking these larger updates (usually iPod fixes) into smaller manageable downloads to be reassembled and checksummed later, Apple sincerely believes that their users will robotically sit in front of their Macs and retry these choked downloads.

In many cases you can bypass the process by going to Apple:Support:Downloads, and downloading the file directly with your browser (Safari tends to have better luck with resuming large downloads).

Trouble is, not every update is visible there. SU seems to think I need an iPod updater from 9/23/05, but there isn't an equivalent download I can grab it from. What to do, what to do.

Open the Console app, is what. Not Terminal, but Applications/Utilities/Console.app, and attempt the download once more. In all likelihood you'll find the following type of error:
2005-11-12 17:49:02.582 Software Update[2493] session:product:061-2099 didFailWithError:NSError "timed out" Domain=NSURLErrorDomain Code=-1001 UserInfo={
NSErrorFailingURLKey = http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/63/63/061-2099/ FT96wN8RF2sM3TL@FpDNGm9RjbdCfj/iPod2005-09-23.tar;
NSErrorFailingURLStringKey = "http://swcdn.apple.com/content/downloads/63/63/061-2099/ FT96wN8RF2sM3TL@FpDNGm9RjbdCfj/iPod2005-09-23.tar";
NSLocalizedDescription = "timed out";
}
Nov 12 17:55:15 Andrew-Roazens-Computer mDNSResponder: ERROR: read_msg - client version 0x32303035 does not match daemon version 0x00000001
Mac OS X Version 10.4.3 (Build 8F46)


Irritating, eh? But notice now that you have an actual URL to attempt a direct download from. Select the URL, right-click it and a context menu will give you the option of going directly to that URL in your default browser. Perfect, no. Doable, yes.

Edit: Unless Apple's running Apache 2.0 with mod_deflate enabled, this isn't even being sent as a gzip but a regular tarfile. (If you're a *nix n00b, most patches and software that you have to compile yourself tend to be .tar.gz/.tgz files.) OTOH if the file is being compressed server-side live as a gz, that isn't terribly smart either. Right-click, open the tarfile with BOMArchiveHelper and you'll get a folder with another tarfile inside and a signature file; ignore the signature and right-click the second tarfile to unpack it with BOMArchiveHelper. Voila, your update package.