1 WSUS and 1 Wireless question

[darren5972]

I recently started to support a Primary School network for 3 hours per week. They currently have an IBM xSeries Server running 2003 with 1GB of RAM.

 

They have ~20 desktop and ~30 vista business laptops. They are intending to purchase 60 netbooks and have a wireless infrastructure instructure installed. I'm not sure what kind of wireless system to advise them to get; I'm thinking they need a managed solution as I'm only there 3 hours a week and they can ring a third party if they get problems.

 

The other unrelated issue i'd like advise on is WSUS; they currently have only one server (no plans to get another) which is the dc but it also runs WSUS which is quite heavy on it's resources. WSUS hasn't been touched for over a year and many security patches need approving as well as other issues. I'm thinking of removing WSUS and letting all the desktops/laptop get their windows updates once a week by leaving them on overnight once a week (probably the night before my visit) is this a good idea?

 

Many Thanks

Darren

Edited September 7, 2009 by Ric_
Tidy up the formatting

[Tricky_Dicky]

Hi,

 

Regards the wireless then I would go for a Ruckus solution. Have a hunt around the forums and loads of people talk about it. It very easy to setup and basically just works out of the box, right down to swapping channels and reducing power output when it detects interferance. It is also a lot cheaper than almost all other managed systems. Have a word with CP Ltd for a good price.

 

The WSUS problem, you might as well uninstall it and reconfigure the GPOs so that they get their own updates, would save a lot of bother in the short term and when you get a bit more settled have a look at implementing a better solution.

 

Good luck

 

Rich

[Haptic]

Hi,

 

Regards the wireless then I would go for a Ruckus solution. Have a hunt around the forums and loads of people talk about it. It very easy to setup and basically just works out of the box, right down to swapping channels and reducing power output when it detects interferance. It is also a lot cheaper than almost all other managed systems. Have a word with CP Ltd for a good price.

 

The WSUS problem, you might as well uninstall it and reconfigure the GPOs so that they get their own updates, would save a lot of bother in the short term and when you get a bit more settled have a look at implementing a better solution.

 

Good luck

 

Rich

 

Many thanks for the recomendation Rich,

 

If anybody would like any info on Ruckus or Meru Wireless solutions be sure to pm me your details:cool:

[cookie_monster]

We have WSUS running on a P3 1GHz with 1Gb RAM and it services 400 PC's it really hardly touches that box. You could put in another gig of RAM in the server and if storage is an issue configure the clients to download patches from MS but you still have control of who has what and you can keep a log of their update status.

[Dom_]

+1 for ruckus from CPLTD

[p858snake]

The other unrelated issue i'd like advise on is WSUS; they currently have only one server (no plans to get another) which is the dc but it also runs WSUS which is quite heavy on it's resources. WSUS hasn't been touched for over a year and many security patches need approving as well as other issues. I'm thinking of removing WSUS and letting all the desktops/laptop get their windows updates once a week by leaving them on overnight once a week (probably the night before my visit) is this a good idea?

That wouldn't probably be a good idea because that will saturate the bandwidth which might end up with no clients getting it, you should probably recreate images for your various machines with all the updates applied and roll the images out then clean our your wsus backlog and properly manage it.

[darren5972]

Great! Thanks for your help.

[cookie_monster]

That wouldn't probably be a good idea because that will saturate the bandwidth which might end up with no clients getting it, you should probably recreate images for your various machines with all the updates applied and roll the images out then clean our your wsus backlog and properly manage it.

 

The BITS service (on the clients and server) should prevent the bandwidth from being saturated that's part of what it's designed to do.