Hi,
I haven't used WSUS before so if this sounds like a stupid question please understand.
As a bit of background; we build and sell a few PCs (maybe 5-10 a week) and do IT support for small companies. Every PC we build though we have to do Windows Updates on. Sometimes they download quickly, but more often then not we end up throttled by MS and the updates trickle in.
I have just setup WSUS on our own internal network on a 2003 server and it seems to be working fine. What I'm wondering though is what are my options for using this WSUS server to update the PCs we build? The PCs would be connected to our network etc., but we'd have no reason to join them to our domain.
The conditions would be - 1. Don't really want to have to join the PCs to the domain, too messy but if it's the only way it's not the end of the world - 2. Have to be able to force an update to happen straight away, and preferrably from the client PC - 3. The PCs will be going on to sites typically without WSUS servers so once we're finished updating them any settings changed would need to revert back to updating from windowsupdate.microsoft.co
Can we make a script, stick it on a floppy to be run on each PC that changes settings, forces an update then changes the settings back? All client PCs will be Windows XP.
Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated!
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1. You can happily use your WSUS server with non-domain members.
2. That's possible, it's described somewhere in the WSUS documentation (can't access them at the moment, but I remember seeing it there, just don't remember the "How").
3. You just need to change the necessary registry keys (described in the documentation as well), or use a local group policy (Computer Configuration\Administrati
LucienJanssens - Sorry, what I meant by trickling down was that we are using the updates on demand at the moment from www.windowsupdate.com. However sometimes when you connect up and start the downloads they go at full speed (4mb/s for us) but often they go very slow, as though MS do random throttling to conserve bandwidth. It's kidna strange actually, if it's going slow you can stop and start the downloading again and it will sometimes go full speed. I've noticed this on PCs throughout Ireland so I'm sure it's not something we're going to be able to fix, so I want to have the updates locally. Plus it just seems stupid to be downloading hundreds of megs of updates a week when they're the same thing over and over.
A proxy could work, though I wonder would it actually cache Windows Update files? Sounds like it could be a lot of grief to be honest. WSUS looks like it could be the perfect solution, if it can be configured right, but as I've never used it before and don't yet understand the concepts of it I'm at a loss right now.
Look at this: http://support.microsoft.c
You may also want to evaluate the applicability of this: http://support.microsoft.c
Also, if you load the OS via Ghost or some other disk mirroring software, look at this: http://support.microsoft.c
You may also want to look at this if the workstations are still using WindowsUpdate even after you think you have them configured to look at WSUS: http://support.microsoft.c
I hope these help,
Walkabout
That's exactly the kind of thing I was looking for WalkaboutTigger! I'll test this today and come back then...
It's a shame MS didn't put a web frontend onto WSUS like their update site so you could just browse to it, hit Express/Custom and see the updates your PC needs, select them and see progress etc..
Hmm, a lot of that stuff doesn't seem to work with the new versions of Windows Update or something; registry keys don't exist etc. Quite a manual way of doing it as well unfortunately.
I asked on the MS site and was pointed to this - http://uphold2001.brinkste
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by: LucienJanssensPosted on 2005-12-08 at 10:42:05ID: 15446885
Why not run Windows update and install the updates on demand, instead of letting them trickle in via BITS(2)
(www.windowsupdate.com)
I think it's easier than having to configure these PC's to use your local WSUS server.
If you want to speed things up, maybe you could consider setting up an internet proxy server that caches the windows updates.
Cheers,
Lucien