Well sussed

Type this, www.microsoft.com, into your Internet browser. This happens to be a rather special URL. It’s the URL you get taken to if you’re trying to locate the Deployment Guide for WSUS – and it’s a load of crock. Put simply, this page still gives me 404 errors whenever I go there, yet I get to it by following the links off the official WSUS homepage.

No matter, I’ve now located all the documentation I needed by going to the download page for WSUS, looking in the bottom-right corner of the page and following the links there. This is something I hadn’t discovered, though, at the time I was forced to answer the question I posed at the end of last month’s column. Regular readers will therefore be wondering ‘Did he do it? Did he take the plunge and try to rerun setup for WSUS on his nice shiny SUS server system without having consulted the Deployment Guide that he couldn’t locate?’ Hey, this is me! Of course I did…

The result? Well, the installation went fine, so I now had a pristine SUS installation and an equally pristine WSUS installation on the same machine. However, I couldn’t see any way to get the WSUS installation to use the already downloaded, configured and assigned files the SUS server was currently using. As you can imagine, I was in no great rush to download all these updates again, especially as I wouldn’t only be downloading Windows Critical Updates and Service Packs, but also all the optional Windows files, along with all of the same for Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server (including MSDE) and Microsoft Exchange Server. I decided to have a think about the best course of action and then pinged off some emails to folks I felt could help me locate said Deployment Guide. In the meantime, I opted to download what might be regarded as a set of headers that described the available updates rather than the entire files, and having done that I found I now had a grand total of 338 entries to peruse, all listed under the title of ‘blah’.

That seemed a little bit on the low side, especially as WSUS was designed to retrieve patches for so many new server systems, so I headed to the Options page to make sure I’d set it up properly. I hadn’t. Under the heading ‘Products’ I’d seen an entry ‘All Windows products’ and gone for that: I suppose I should have screwed my brain in a bit tighter that morning, as I’d then have worked out that this particular entry only referred to operating systems and not to the full range of server and application products designed to run under Windows and supported by WSUS.

Clicking on the Change button took me to the full list of products, and three mouse clicks later I was back on the Options page, dialog dismissed and looking at a list that now read:

All Exchange products

All Office products

All SQL products

All Windows products.

I don’t know about you, but I think that last entry ‘All Windows products’ is ambiguous to the point of being positively misleading. It could do with being changed to ‘All supported Windows operating systems’. I also looked to the other side of the Options page and decided to see just how many Update Classifications I hadn’t downloaded. The default classifications are ‘Critical Updates’ and ‘Security Updates’. Several mouse clicks later I was staring at a somewhat longer list that read as follows:

Connectors

Critical updates

Development kits

Drivers

Feature packs