WSUS

ClientDiag.exe for troubleshooting WSUS

There is a great tool from Microsoft to troubleshoot SUS installations from the client. From my experience it tells you fairly quickly where the problem lies.
Download from this location with the Readme. These are linked (at the moment) from the wsus support page which also contains a link to the server version of this tool (which I’ve not tried yet)
A good set of results can be found in the extended entry.

Windows Update Group Policies

Seeing as though its been a long time since i’ve done much work with Group Policies, it took me a long time to work out why the policy for disabling Windows Updates within IE and the start menu would not work, yet the settings for telling where the client should go to get its updates did work.
Eventually I read a website which tipped me off and is actually obvious when you think about it. I had created an OU and moved computers into it, but I hadn’t added the users to the OU. Therefore only the computer configs were amended but not the users.
Now that I’ve done it correctly, WUS seems to be working pretty well (apart from one machine that thinks it needs to download .net framework 1.0 patches when in actual fact it needs to download 1.1 patches.

Wus install broke group policy – oops!

I installed Windows Update Services on a new server this morning (the old sus server did not have the free disk space or software requirements) and I edited group policy on my laptop to make my machine talk to the new server. However when I then tried to use group policy on the servers I got a “string is too long” when editing the policies. This is a known bug and is fixed by installing an update kb842933 (which needed a reboot)

Catch-Up

Not having that much internet access and the time to blog, I’ve quickly gone through my feeds and pulled a couple of things out of them

  • A WUS Wiki which sounds like a bad day for Jonathan Ross, but is actually a wiki for the new Windows Update Services.
  • Links to video’s of the Tsunami. This hit whilst we were on holiday and I never got to see any moving pictures of the wave itself – saw plenty of horrific news photos of the devastation afterwards though.
  • I removed Norton AntiVirus off the home computer as the subscription had run out and I’m not impressed with the number of infections that have gotten past it this year. Instead I’ve tried the free home edition of Avast’s Antivir software which looks ok. It certainly picked up on eicar when I downloaded it – will be interesting to see how it copes with email borne virus’s