In this lecture, we are going to talk about how you can troubleshoot your WSUS clients that are not reporting to your WSUS server.

We are going to follow a series of instructions that Microsoft provides so we can troubleshoot and fix these issues.

Now, we are doing these steps in a workstation that is checking into WSUS, but it doesn’t matter if it is done from a workstation that is checking or not checking to WSUS, the steps are exactly the same.

Let's do a ping and verify we have a connection to our WSUS Server.

Click on the Windows icon at the bottom left and type cmd. Right-click on the Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.

Type ping ipwsus01 and press Enter.

We have successful replies from ipwsus01.

Keep in mind that if your firewall is blocking ping requests it might make it look like we don’t have communication with the server but really it is just the firewall not allowing ping.

Now, Try to access the WSUS server from the Web Browser.

Click on the Windows icon at the bottom left and type internet and click Internet Explorer from the list.

Type in the address of our WSUS server http://ipwsus01:8530. This is by default the port we configured and press Enter.

We can see we get a blank page and this means actually we are accessing the Web Server. If we try a different port we can see a different screen with an error message.

Now, what we need to do is try to download this particular cab file from the web browser. Type http://ipwsus01:8530/selfupdate/wuident.cab and press Enter.

We are going to get a download prompt if successful. We can click Save or Cancel. This tells us that our self-update tree is configured in our client and that means that we’ve configured properly when to install updates, the scheduling, whether we have a choice to install the updates later, etc.

We can close the web browser.

Now, let’s query the registry.

Back to the Command Prompt window, we will type reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE and press Enter. We will see all the paths we can choose from.

Let’s press the Up arrow and go back to the same command and type reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate and press Enter.

We should see information about our WSUS server configured in the registry settings.

Now, if we press the Up arrow again and go back to the same command and type reg query HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU and press Enter.

Here is where we can find the settings for the update tree.

If you are missing these settings it might be that your Group Policy Object is not applying to the computer.

The other thing you can do is type in Command Prompt gpresult /r and press Enter.

Look under Computer Settings for the WSUS Client Configuration.

The last thing we can do to troubleshoot is to reset the automatic update client and we can do it by typing in Command Prompt wuauclt.exe /resetauthorization /detectnow and press Enter.

Those are all the steps you need to make if you have a WSUS client not reporting in.