WSUS - Unsure

[Fleetwood]

Hi all,

 

A while back (around December) I had just setup WSUS and all was going very well for my first time using it. Unfortunately though, at some point, all the PCs on site had a very odd error where any users created the day after our Exchange server was upgraded to 2013 (from the external IT support company we use for major systems) had profile corruption issues. The theme went back to Windows Classic, and Outlook refused to open (Cannot open default email folders)

 

I uninstalled WSUS, reimaged all the PCs (it was the only fix I could find.. tedious!) and forgot all about it as it had put me off. However WSUS seems such a useful utility and I really want to learn how to use it better, but that incident put me off using it again.

 

I was just curious to know if anybody has come across the above issues before? Was it WSUS? Was it something weird with the Exchange server upgrade? Or am I just an unlucky sod?

 

Thank you

Lé Amateur

[snagrat]

Unlucky sod.

 

Generally WSUS works well. Once setup unless someone decides to change something then it just ticks away in the background.

 

I suggest you try again and tell your external IT support to stop breaking things!!

[3s-gtech]

WSUS is lush when working properly. We've recently pushed out Office 2013 SP1, IE11 plus a huge bunch of other updates. I also integrate my Flash updates into it using Local Update Publisher. I'd be lost without it.

[Fleetwood]

Admittedly it was my own stupid fault for deploying all updates across site rather than a test machine first, so maybe I should try that approach and if all works well I'll then deploy after. Thanks for the responses, has put my confidence of using it back up

[minimoo]

@3s-gtech - interesting - how well do you find that works for the non-MS updates? [i use a powershell startup script to deploy flash, which also 'fixes' some flash corruption things we had in the past, and msi gpo's for java/reader - both methods seem to be low maintenance for me now at least (partly because you have to update the things once a month ), and push out the options microsoft updates e.g. IE11 via WSUS]

@TBlax: what I've done for the last few years is set up a few targetting groups via group policy (so that servers end up in a separate group to workstations for example) - Historically I made lots of groups - now I've basically collapsed to 'servers', 'workstations' , 'wireless'. I have WSUS sync automatically, however tell it not to automatically deploy most updates. This way, you can choose to wait a day or two before deploying a Microsoft update in case they pull it back, but you get a global picture of what updates are missing. And at the end of the day, the updates are the same ones that come out to home PC's via windows updates, so you shouldn't really hit any problems - if anything you have more control.

 

In our case, we are pretty much standardized on windows 7 64bit, so it's not that much of a task to manually approve the 20 security/updates microsoft release once a month. I suspect people that have different operating systems on their school site would find it a pain doing it that way.

[3s-gtech]

I really only use it for Flash and Shockwave players. It is good, a few machines won't like an update but will usually take the next one. We also use it for installing to freshly imaged machines. It fails if you try to push the update to a machine that has had it manually installed, and it obviously fails on our 8.1 PCs so they're in their own category.