Automatic Updates Big Fix

[mem.namefix]

Greetings all, first time poster long time etc etc.

I support a large win32 & unix network for my current employer, having come onto an existing setup I found that the previous admin for the WSUS server had done an asbolutely terrible job of maintaing it. Automatic Update Client faults on 100's (litterally) of pc's all having their own special issue to resolve.

Thanks to the excellent info found in these forums i have made a tool written in autoit that so far seems to fix every issue thrown at it. While i used todo all this in 1 big bat file, I found it much easier to have a gui to select what was needed and run it (much more convient than repeatedly copy&pasting out the cmd's).

The app is by no means complete yet but it has been thoroughly tested.

Feel free to contact me in regards to additional AU fixes or anything. The app has only been used on windows xp 32bit as thats all my business and I use.

Quick todo:

* make a nsi installer

* Download needed apps from ms directly.

* add any other needed fixes

* cmd line switches

AU Big Fix - filefactory

AU Big Fix - filedropper

AU Big Fix - savefile

Cheers

[DigeratiPrime]

I wonder what type of problems were caused on XP clients by updates that requires these fixes?

[mem.namefix]

DigeratiPrime, it seemed to be quite a mixture of issues. Alot of the users had local admin rights which enabled them to screw up their AU settings.

Others seemed to be caused by the catroot dirs becoming corrupted and yet more were caused by the local user owning catroot rather than the system (I have nfi how that came about).

The computers at my work control labatory instruments and tend to run 24/7 so they are never logged out or rebooted - this does seem to cause AU some issues after awhile.

I have never seen a site in such a bad state, so it was a wide selection of AU errors to deal with. I am still working my way through the computers with the issues and would be happy to do some investigation and post excerpts of windowsupdate.log.

Most threads I found unfortunately dealt with how the issue could be fixed not what caused it.

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

I adopted a network a few years ago that sounds like it had a lot in common with yours. several WSUS servers specified on the clients (but none of the servers still there) so AU was effectively broken on about 50% of the PCs the other 50% were grabbibg updates from MS directly(if the user had admin). At the time this was a non-ad (broken novel) environment and most of the time i didnt even have admin rights on PCs unless the users were given admin rights(i carried a password crack CD with me for about a year) these days, were about 90% AD with about 95% of those reporting correctly to WSUS and i so far havent found a pc that i cant fix with my set of hacked together bat files (given the time).

Ive already added this tool to my utilities folder and plan to use it. Im eager to try it using the installer and command line switches (id like to be able to execute 1 exe file remotely using psexec)

[mem.namefix]

PC_LOAD_LETTER

Yes it does sound like we have been down the same path, even to the point of creating the big bat file

remote execution via psexec is the intended goal and its my next target since the current version of AU big fix seems to handle all my current au client issues.

I should have cmd line options added next week and fortunately for me I have a large amount of client PC's waiting to be tested

current planned cmd line options:

/all : run all fixes

/simple : run simple fixes

/uws : use wsus server

/duws : dont use wsus server

and of course the ability to turn on each option from the cmd line, suggestions for option names are welcome as I really do suck @ names

Edited July 26, 2009 by mem.namefix