jamf stuck on “Locating hardware information (macOS 11.6.5)”

We use jamf at work, and I periodically run jamf recon and jamf policy to ensure that things are all up to date.

I noticed that the process was consistently hanging with the message Stuck on “Locating hardware information (macOS 11.6.5)”. From my googling it looked as though this was software update related, so I uninstalled jamf, applied the update and then reinstalled. Problem solved!

That is, until I tried to run jamf recon again and it hung at the same point. I opened up software update and it just hung, with the gear spinning forever.

More googling ensued, and I eventually found the magic command that I needed to get things working again:

bash
sudo launchctl kickstart -k system/com.apple.softwareupdated

Once softwareupdated had restarted, I could run jamf recon without any issues