SP3 rollout woes

eth0_

I am trying to figure out how to roll-out SP3 in my company.

We have a head office and lots of smaller offices which have their own local file servers and connect to the domain over VPN (so they have full access to the network), so potentially we could use WSUS to push SP3 to them.

However we have many more little offices that are based in local councils, so they have more limited access and fairly slow internet access, however they are still within our domain.

For these limited access offices, i'm not sure how to push SP3 to them.

I know its possible to push a script to them which will force Windows automatic updates, but is it possible to limit this to just updating SP3?

Any help much appreciated!

ttm

But think of what you are saying? You want to push out SP3 to small offices that are all over the country. So you know for sure that you can get to any machine that croaks during the update?

If they are in your domain (MS use of the word) then stick them all in an administrative group or groups and set up the small offices group(s) to use the nearest WUS server but to check for authorised updates but then to go out and get the updates from the web. LOL almost sounds like and M$ exam question ;-)

Edit> Havn't worked with the latest WUS and I'm guessing you might need an additional WUS server for these users at head office (no big deal WUS will install on any Server or even on XP) and then you can authorise only SP3 for them and then you have the option to say where the updates are dwonloaded from so don't have to clog up you network with this traffic.

eth0_

Machines croaking isn't a huge deal as we have a service contract with a 3rd party service company who can fix things we can't fix remotely.

The small admin groups idea sounds good, i'll look into it, cheers

ttm

ttm wrote: »

But think of what you are saying? You want to push out SP3 to small offices that are all over the country. So you know for sure that you can get to any machine that croaks during the update?

If they are in your domain (MS use of the word) then stick them all in an administrative group or groups and set up the small offices group(s) to use the nearest WUS server but to check for authorised updates but then to go out and get the updates from the web. LOL almost sounds like and M$ exam question ;-)

Edit> Havn't worked with the latest WUS and I'm guessing you might need an additional WUS server for these users at head office (no big deal WUS will install on any Server or even on XP) and then you can authorise only SP3 for them and then you have the option to say where the updates are dwonloaded from so don't have to clog up you network with this traffic.

Interesting. We have a WSUS server serving our main site which covers about 8 companies.

We also have remote sites that are connected by site to site VPN not currently managed with WSUS.

How do you go about setting up WSUS for remote offices to grab their updates from a local server or even windows update?

ttm

ronoc wrote: »

Interesting. We have a WSUS server serving our main site which covers about 8 companies.

We also have remote sites that are connected by site to site VPN not currently managed with WSUS.

How do you go about setting up WSUS for remote offices to grab their updates from a local server or even windows update?

Edit> I may have this totally wrong and need to research this as I havn't used WUS in ages and not touched WUS 3.0 yet, but there is no reason if there is VPN access between sites that users at a remote site (on the end of a slow link) can't use a local WUS server. Even if the remote machines aren't in your domain its only a registy setting change to have them look for a specific server. I'll take a look and see if I can find the relevant technet articles abotu how to set it all up.

ttm

Got a bit mixed up, SUS Version 1 was updated by SUS Version 2 which seems to have got renamed WSUS and the latest encarnation is WSUS 3.0.

By WUS I was referning to SUS 2.0 aka WSUS 2.0 but let me know if I've misunderstood that as its a few years since I used what at the time I called SUS 2.0 with sp1.

Capt'n Midnight

you could expand sp3 to i386 folder and look at the update sub folder
and set a shortcut to do a silent install