[TUTORIAL] WSUS without a domain
First of all, what the hell is WSUS? WSUS (Windows Update Services) is Microsoft’s free patch management tool. In a corporate environment, it’s not wise or useful for every client to retrieve and apply updates from Microsoft. The least of which, the potential dent in corporate Internet access. WSUS is, effectively, a proxy for Windows Updates. One server configured as an update server retrieves all the updates for all the operating systems once and then farms them out to my clients.Clients in this case can include BOTH workstations and servers. “Are you insane releasing updates untested?!” I hear you ask. The answer is another feature of WSUS; the ability to release updates selectively to clients to test and THEN release to the greater network.
WSUS is a service you run internally on servers and pushes out to automatic update clients. WSUS can be configured to download updates from the Internet (Microsoft’s site) or an upstream WSUS server, allowing me to build a hierarchical infrastructre. This may be appropriate for departmental WSUS servers. Administrators have the control of approval of updates and WSUS downloads it from it configured upstream and issues it to clients. Approval can be done to particular groups of computers, or based on the criticality of of an update.
Administration in older versions of WSUS was done via a web interface. More recent releases have incorporated a MMC plug-in for administration.
This has been the arena of the corporate environments (configuration of Automatic Update clients via group policy) where I can afford a server to perform this task for me. In a small office/home office environment, I may not have the available resources to dedicate for one big, expensive Windows 2003 server to do WSUS. The following links detail ways “around” having to setup WSUS on a Windows 2003 box.
For workgroups, the following links are very helpful for setting up a WSUS server without a domain.
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/482665.html
http://www.neowin.net/forum/lofiversion/index.php/t231689.html - WSUS installed on Windows XP
http://msmvps.com/blogs/athif/archive/2005/09/14/Manually_Configure_WUA.aspx - Manually Configure Automatic Update Client (WUA) for WSUS in a workgroup environment
Technet info on WSUS Environment variables:
Just another useful resource: http://www.wsuswiki.com/susfaq
Posted on January 11th, 2008 | By: Adam | Filed under Geekery, Tutorials
