WSUS on SBS2008

wij · 22 Jan 2010 at 09:17

Have a client with an SBS2008 install, they recently moved ISP to get away from BT and get a better quality of service.

Part of that though means they now pay for bandwidth on the connection and WSUS seems to be sucking down about 2-3Gb of data every day. This wouldn't be a problem if it stuck to its schedule and did it after hours when the bandwidth "cost" is very much lower.

I've had a Google around and seen various suggestions of capping the BITS service using a domain policy but that didn't seem to do anything for me.

Stopping the WSUS service entirely cures the problem, so I'm thinking that I may just be brutal and use task schedular to start/stop the service at specific times of day.

Before I go ahead and do that does anybody have perhaps a more elegant solution, as taking that action will likely cause SBS to whinge about the service not running!

DiscoDave · 22 Jan 2010 at 15:23

Hi wij,

What are your synchronisation settings? Ie how many syncs per day.

Also check which products you've got selected to download - ensure you're only downloading updates for software you have running in your environment.

brainchylde · 22 Jan 2010 at 21:34

Sounds like a lot of data.... something going wrong there by the sounds of it. Even if you had every product selected, 3GB per day is massive.

BlueMhz · 22 Jan 2010 at 22:23

One of the biggest points of WSUS is that patches are downloaded once and cached on the WSUS server. Sounds like there's something worng with the setup of your WSUS server if it's downloading GBs every day. Maybe check the WSUS logs for any errors.

wij · 23 Jan 2010 at 12:23

Sync settings are once per day at 22:00, machines (XP clients) are all set to receive updates at 03:00.

There were no errors in the WSUS logs at all, at least nothing that would suggest a fault.

Config is the SBS2008 default settings as far as what to download goes, if you try changing anything such as what products to check for updates for it bitches and whines.

All machines in the SBS2008 console show as being up to date too, so got no idea really what its doing.

BlueMhz · 23 Jan 2010 at 13:28

In the WSUS console, in Synchronizations folder does it show it downloads patches everyday?

Is there enough space on the WSUS server to hold all the patches? check for a folder called WSUS\WSUSContent this is where the downloaded patches are stored.

m4cc45 · 23 Jan 2010 at 13:58

That to me sounds like you're downloading all the patches over and over again - not enough space being the most obvious thing. Try also changing the language settings so you are only downloading English patches (I think by default you get all languages).

M.

brainchylde · 23 Jan 2010 at 17:22

All your machines are showing up in "All Computers" aren't they?

Two things possible :

1) As above - you are downloading patches over and over.. in many languages.
2) Your machines are not downloading from WSUS, but directly from MS. Are you sure the windows update options are configured correctly?

wij · 23 Jan 2010 at 22:12

Server has loads of storage available (at least 500Gb), so very much doubt that is what it's unhappy about.

Only language set is English, only things ticked are bits of software we own.

All machines are set up correctly and the traffic is definatley being generated by the SBS box anyway as I can see that from other monitoring software and the pattern is very regular (big spies in usage every 1hr) and as soon as I disabled WSUS they stopped and did not return.