Windows Update

All of our Windows machines pull updates from our WSUS server named Pierce. Machines are separated into groups by the OUs in Active Directory. Deep Freeze has a way that it identifies which OU a machine will fall in to. I will talk more about this later.

Lab Machines

Lab machines all have Deep Freeze installed, and are setup to pull any Approved updates every Thursday morning at the beginning of their Thawed Period.

Faculty Machines

Faculty Machines are set to automatically download updates. They will not automatically install these updates until the user takes further action.

Windows Servers

All machines in the CIS Servers OU, will download updates automatically, but require manually installation. Typically you can just login to the machine and go to Windows Update and complete the process, but for Hoover (PW Reset Server) there is no user interface (it’s a Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Core Installation). To keep Core servers updates, you either have to set them up to download updates automatically (using a GPO), or use PowerShell to manually update them. I have chosen to use the following PowerShell scripts provided by Microsoft to manually update Hoover.

PSWindowsUpdate has been installed to the C:\Windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\Modules\PSWindowsUpdate folder. This allows you to simply call the PSWindowsUpdate functions from a PowerShell command prompt.

Steps:

1. RDP to Hoover. A command window will appear.
2. Type “powershell” to enter a PowerShell environment.
3. Type “Get-WUInstall” to install all available updates
   1. You will be prompted with the following options: [Y] Yes [A] Yes to All [N] No [L] No to All [S] Suspend [?] Help
   2. Pick accordingly. Typically “A” is what we want.
4. Updates will be installed

Notes:

• Commonly used wuauclt commands: (see more here)
  • If status is not being reported to WSUS: wuauclt /ResetAuthorization /DetectNow
  • To force a report to send to WSUS: wuauclt /ReportNow /DetectNow
• On an unrelated note, I’m going to install NSClient++ on Hoover after this round of Windows Updates. Following these instructions: http://heavysoil.net/nsclient-install-on-windows-core-and-hyper-v-server/