[geeks] Windows XP, and activation

[Chad McAuley]

On 11/6/06, Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com> wrote:
>
> Mon, 06 Nov 2006 @ 09:47 -0600, Chad McAuley said:
>
> > detection, etc", but at least it does give you some control over it.
> > Anything that isn't automatically approved you can go in and manually
> > approve; here for each individual update you can say detect for group 1,
> > install for group 2, do not install for group 3, etc.
>
> Could you set up different update servers for each group, and have
> machines in those groups point to those individual update servers?
>
> Also, how do you tell a Windows machine to use a local server for
> updates?
>


1) I haven't actually tried it, but I see no reason why that wouldn't work.
You can also set up parent/child (I think upstream/downstream is the
terminology MS uses) WSUS servers so that only one would download
the updates from MS and then the rest would download from the parent
server.  I *think* off the top of my head you can also go more than two
levels deep, but I'd have to look at the WSUS docs to be sure.

2) Group policy is the easiest way, especially if all the machines are
members of a domain.  Even in a non Active Driectory environment,
using the group policy editor would still allow you to change the same
settings, although if you had to change it on more than a few machines
it'd get real tedious real quick.  The settings in the group policy editor
map to registry entries, so if you had a whole bunch of non-domain PCs
you wanted to apply the settings to you could save everything to a .reg
file and import them on the other end.

The group policy settings for specifying a local update server are located
under Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows
Compolents -> Windows Update[0].  The policy of interest is called
"Specify intranet Microsoft Update service location".  The corresponding
registry settings are under
HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate
There WUServer and WUStatusServer correspond to the detection and
status servers referred to in the group policy editor.  The AU folder in
that location holds the settings for  update times and such, and I think
UseWUServer needs to be set to true for it to actually use the local
server you specified.

Hope that helps.






[0]  If that folder isn't there, then you need to add wuau.adm to the policy

editor.  Right click on Admin. templates under Computer configuration,
go to add/remove, click add, and the browse window should open in
c:\windows\inf, which is where wuau.adm can be found.