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We have an environment with around 30 windows server machines all subscribed to a WSUS server. We approve updates through WSUS, but the actual installation of the updates is done manually on each server.

Is there any way I can run a command to kick off the installation on all servers at once? I don't want to set these servers to install updates automatically via GPO because we test the updates first and that sometimes takes weeks.

Thanks!

2 Answers 2

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We spent a very long time trying to figure this out. Ultimately, we resorted to using wuinstall to trigger the update process. You still need some way of executing this on all the machines, in our case we used Cygwin SSHD. You probably want something like psexec instead though.

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You could write a script that would use wuauclt.exe utility.

In particular, the command:

wuauclt.exe /updatenow

You could also this command first to ensure it checks the WSUS server for the latest approved updates prior to downloading and running the updates.

wuauclt.exe /detectnow

Realistically though, you should setup computer groups in WSUS. You can setup your GPO's to assign specific computers into a test computer group in WSUS and set all your servers to update automatically. You could then still use WSUS to approve the updates first to your test computer group and then only approve them to the main computer groups with the rest of your severs after they have been tested.

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  • +1 for doing it right with GPOs via test groups, etc. -- Traditionally IT is the test group (getting updates on Patch Tuesday) & it's phased in across the rest of the org from least to most sensitive.
    – voretaq7
    Nov 15, 2013 at 22:56
  • @voretaq7 Thanks but apparently the author original post disagrees that it should be done this way and that a 3rd party utility is the right answer he was looking for instead of doing things right or even using the built in command line tools I also mentioned. sigh
    – Rex
    Nov 18, 2013 at 18:35

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