danblee.com

Tutorials & Knowledge Base Articles for System Administrators who wear many, many hats.

WSUS not detecting clients and not listing computers

by 20 Comments

  • System Setup: Windows Server 2012 with WSUS 3.0 and IIS 8 Installed
  • Clients: Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2008 R2

You’ve done everything right but for some reason you just can’t see the clients. Here’s a quick check list:

  1. If you go to your SUS server, for example http://wsus you can see a blank page and not simply the IIS splash page
  2. You can ping between both the SUS server and your client
  3. Firewalls are turned off on both the SUS server and your client
  4. The group policy you put in place is pointing to your SUS server address

You need to see a blank page at your SUS server site. For example, if you head to http://wsus and you see the IIS splash page, you’re doing it wrong. Head into IIS on the SUS server and check to see the port of the website WSUS sets up. Sometimes it will not be the default. In which case you need to point to http://wsus:8530 instead. In my case, my server is http://ENTWSUS, so my address in group policy will be http://ENTWSUS:8530

See the image below:

WSUS

 

You’ll need to update your GPO to reflect this. Here’s my example:

WSUS GPO

When you’re done with this change, you’ll need to do the following:

  1. Force the update using the command: gpupdate /force
  2. Force the service to detect the client now using: wuauclt /detectnow. Go back into your WSUS client and refresh to make sure the computer is now there
  3. Force the service to report to the client after it’s detected using: wuauclt /reportnow

You can probably combine the detect and report switches on one line, but I don’t think reporting works if it’s not detected. This makes sure of that.