5

My boss and I were sitting in our server room today when we all of a sudden heard one of our servers go into hyper-speed, indicating that it was restarting. You can imagine the immediate "oh crap" expressions on our faces.

We dug into the logs, and it appears that there were some updates automatically installed that required a restart. AU, seeing that there was no one logged in, automatically did the restart. This is a production server, so we have automatic updates turned off (not even downloading then waiting.. It should wait for us to tell it before it does anything).

I ran both rsop.msc and gpedit.msc to check if there was a rogue group policy that forced the automatic updating. Nothing.

Our windowsupdate.log shows this:

2011-12-16  09:00:12:092     964    17f4    AU  Setting AU scheduled install time to 2011-12-16 20:00:00

(there were many more lines like that, and one pointing to a scheduled install just minutes before we heard the restart)

So, somewhere, AU is getting the bright idea that it should schedule automatic installs. Any ideas on why that might be happening?

A bit of pertinent information:

We recently (one month ago) installed a WSUS server, and two weeks ago pointed all of our servers at it. With WSUS came forefront client security, with a policy set up to do automatic definition updates every 6 hours. This could possibly be the problem, but it seems like a major flaw that by checking for definition updates it would automatically install other updates.

I also rolled out (I believe last Thursday) a new GPO for our workstations that forces automatic updating at 2:00 PM. This was applied to a select few workstations in the company and NONE OF THE SERVERS. I confirmed that that group policy wasn't applied through rsop.msc

As far as I can tell, this has only happened on or 2003 servers, but I can't make any promises that it isn't happening on the 2008 servers and I just haven't noticed.

Ideas?

16
  • Here's a quick fix to make sure this doesn't happen again (but not a diagnosis of the issue): use a GPO to disable the Automatic Updates service for all of the servers.
    – joeqwerty
    Dec 20, 2011 at 22:20
  • 2
    Did you put a deadline on an approved update? Dec 20, 2011 at 23:26
  • @ShaneMadden Nope. We've been very intentional about not forcing servers to update. And as far as I'm aware, there's only a few updates that have required deadlines, and those should have been installed years ago.
    – jwegner
    Dec 21, 2011 at 11:41
  • im with joeqwerty here, the only way to make sure this does not happen is to specifically make a GPO to disable to automatic updates.
    – Flash
    Dec 23, 2011 at 13:06
  • 2
    The local policy just modified the registry. Entirely possible that something modified the appropriate keys manually which may not be reflected in a policy or RSoP report. Dec 27, 2011 at 14:51

3 Answers 3

1

On the server itself, from a command prompt, I'd recommend running gpresult (with a /v for Verbose output or a /z for the uber-detailed version) and see of you can locate a policy that is incorrectly applied (or alternative, not applied as it should be for some reason). Also, I'd recommend the >result.txt (or whatever you want to name it) with the /v and /z options - they can get rather wordy and exceed you command prompt screen buffer. Having the results in a text file also makes them searchable, which is nice...

1
  • Just ran gpresult /z (Thanks for the >result.txt tip.. that was way long!). That's a real handy flag - I never knew that. Unfortunately, nothing of interest came up. The only update related policies were WUServer, UseWUServer, and WUStatusServer. Unfortunately.
    – jwegner
    Dec 29, 2011 at 18:11
0

what are your automatic update settings? Check both group policy and local policy. With group policy (if aplicable) run a RSOP which will basically create a picture of what your GP settings look like including taking inheretance into consideration. My guess is you have auto install / reboot setup and MS released an out of band patch.

Secondly, be careful with what classifacation you auto approve. As you point out there's definition updates, but there's also security update, critical (or important) update, reccomended updates. If you have security or critical set to auto approve, and MS releases an out of band patch you're going to get it and it will reboot based on your WSUS scheduled install settings (in gorup policy).

0

Here is an interesting article, though I'm not sure if it applies here.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .