"Software Update" not working!

[nady]

I'd love to know the answer, i am sure it a firewall problem, as when i take the mac book pro home, the updates work fine on the wireless. Maybe it's just a simple thing, like getting the hardwired firewall to except .dmg files maybe?

I get -

“A networking error has occurred: forbidden (-1102). Make sure you can connect to the Internet, then try again.“

Have tried most things like you. As a long winded work around i download the updates manually, but it's such a pain.

[Giaguara]

Ok some more testing.

DNS had only 10.x addresses internally. I added 208.67.222.220 and .222 to the dns list.
This resulted in the same error with softwareupdate, both via terminal and gui.

swcdn.apple.com returns valid results with ping from Terminal.

traceroute: Warning: swcdn.apple.com has multiple addresses; using 69.28.154.170
traceroute to apple.vo.llnwd.net (69.28.154.170), 64 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 10.16.153.254 (10.16.153.254) 0.707 ms 0.377 ms 0.330 ms
2 10.16.141.209 (10.16.141.209) 1.031 ms 0.979 ms 0.828 ms
3 10.16.141.230 (10.16.141.230) 2.258 ms 1.546 ms 2.132 ms
4 10.16.141.126 (10.16.141.126) 0.331 ms 0.312 ms 0.282 ms
5 63.228.185.161 (63.228.185.161) 0.670 ms 0.674 ms 0.528 ms
6 ldn-edge-01.inet.qwest.net (63.225.65.97) 17.799 ms 17.859 ms 17.779 ms
7 ldn-core-01.inet.qwest.net (65.120.24.61) 19.295 ms 17.907 ms 17.992 ms
8 jfk-core-01.inet.qwest.net (67.14.5.2) 85.963 ms 85.958 ms 85.955 ms
9 jfk-brdr-03.inet.qwest.net (205.171.30.2) 86.170 ms 86.575 ms 86.548 ms
10 63.146.26.226 (63.146.26.226) 86.538 ms 86.427 ms 86.952 ms
11 te3-1-10G.ar6.NYC1.gblx.net (67.16.131.110) 86.386 ms 86.375 ms 86.451 ms
12 LIMELIGHT-LGA.TenGigabitEthernet3-3.ar6.NYC1.gblx.net (207.138.144.150) 87.178 ms 86.939 ms 86.716 ms
13 ve2002.fr3.lga.llnw.net (69.28.171.201) 89.376 ms 86.779 ms 86.731 ms
14 cds170.lga.llnw.net (69.28.154.170) 86.997 ms 87.399 ms 86.663 ms

From one system, another Mac gave traceroute for 64.86.71.83, and 64.215.158.65, 64.215.158.33 etc instead, and via a different path. All different IPs solve to a950.g.akamai.net or apple.vo.llnwd.net (or at least from around 10 different IPs I only get those).

So.. um, what kind of load balancers do they have on Apple's site? I suspect all the software updates that fail are located on the same servers on their side. Still I don't get why on these systems it fails while on the majority of the systems it works. If 4 Macs out of 4 have the same problem there has to be something...

I deleted also the softwareupdate cache (in ~/Library) but since the timeout occurs also on root that made no difference.