WSUS Question

Do I need to make a GPO for the whole domain to point clients to a WSUS server regardless of client OS? Or if clients are XP service pack 1 or 2 will everything happen automatically?

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he-man

Hey mkc7985,

A GPO to use WSUS can be be applied to the whole domain, but it can also be applied to individual OU'S if you only wanted a few clients to pick up WSUS.

Wheather or not the clients are SP1/2 is irrelavant

mkc7985

So basically just installing the WSUS service on a server will not set up any of the automatic updates configurations for the clients? A GPO has to be applied to all computers which I would want to point to my WSUS server? Will the clients that are configured for WSUS no longer be allowed to contact microsoft.com directly?

he-man

No, by default installing WSUS on a box doesnt do anything, you have to point your clients at it/apply a policy to.

You can manually connect to the MS update site, but the automatic updates options will actually be greyed out once the GPO has succesfully been applied to a client.

mkc7985

Thanks man I really appreciate it.

sprkymrk

If for whatever reason you don't want to use a GPO, you can simply edit the registry on clients to point to the WSUS server.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate

Smallguy

sprkymrk wrote:

If for whatever reason you don't want to use a GPO, you can simply edit the registry on clients to point to the WSUS server.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate

beat me to it