Auto-Fix Windows Update Agent

[anyweb]

One of the hardest things to tackle in SCCM these days is client health. It is an on-going issue because it is hard to diagnose and hard to programmatically fix. SCCM’s client is much improved over older versions but it still has occasional issues and its dependencies such as WMI and Windows Update Agent still have theirs as well.

 

While looking into this for one customer I came up with a trick that won’t solve all client health problems, but it moves one step closer. This trick is for some of the Windows Update Agent (WUA) issues. If anyone uses this and finds issues or improvements please let me know and I will follow-up or correct this post as needed.

 

The first step is to identify the machines having WUA issues. There are probably several ways but what I found useful was to look for clients sending 11416 status messages. Creating a status message query was easy but creating a collection based on status messages takes a little more work to build. Here is one I put together that seems to do the trick:

 

select distinct SYS.Name,SYS.Client from SMS_StatusMessage as stat join sms_r_system as SYS on stat.machinename = SYS.name where stat.ModuleName = "SMS Client" and stat.MessageID = 11416 and DateDiff(dd,stat.Time, GetDate()) <1

 

This query gets all the machine names that have sent a 11416 status message in the last day and cross references with the system object for that machine so that a collection of machines can be put together.

 

Once you have your collection of machines identified the next step is to send those machines something to repair WUA. KB971058 has a nice Fix It script that will do this and you can download it from the KB. It is an MSI and in my testing using the default settings seemed to be enough to fix most machines. As an MSI you can have SCCM create your package and program by creating a package from definition and pointing at the MSI file itself. This should give you a silent run option.

 

Once you have the package in place advertise it to your collection created based on the query above and see if that solves your WUA health issues. For my customer we saw a 92% reduction in WUA issues using this method.

 

via > http://blogs.technet.com/michaelgriswold/archive/2010/04/15/auto-fix-wmi.aspx

[generalopinion]

Nice. Thanks for this.

[lucent6408d]

Good Morning,

 

I’m hoping someone can help me on this issue, when I run a compliance report to see if my patches are installing fine. I’m seeing that they are installing on half my computers but I’m getting a lot of machines that fall under the "Detection State Unknown" and to make matters worse I actually remote to some of those machines using ConfigMgr to eliminate communication and I see that patches have not hit that machine since Feb24th.

 

Any Ideas?

[Eswar Koneti]

Good Morning,

 

I'm hoping someone can help me on this issue, when I run a compliance report to see if my patches are installing fine. I'm seeing that they are installing on half my computers but I'm getting a lot of machines that fall under the "Detection State Unknown" and to make matters worse I actually remote to some of those machines using ConfigMgr to eliminate communication and I see that patches have not hit that machine since Feb24th.

 

Any Ideas?

 

If the machines are not sent their scan results then it shows as Detection state Unknow because of this,SCCM cont say if the Update is needed or not .

Check if failed machines sent their scna results to the SCCM or not ? if not,check if you have corect the wUA version. can you post scanagent.log file ?

[balihai]

Good Morning,

 

I’m hoping someone can help me on this issue, when I run a compliance report to see if my patches are installing fine. I’m seeing that they are installing on half my computers but I’m getting a lot of machines that fall under the "Detection State Unknown" and to make matters worse I actually remote to some of those machines using ConfigMgr to eliminate communication and I see that patches have not hit that machine since Feb24th.

 

Any Ideas?

 

Also, make sure you still don't have an active GPO that are point the machines to another WSUS point. In my environment, I ended having to update all of the GPOs to point to the SCCM server instead of the WSUS server to get them all working.

[anyweb]

you need to remove any gpo's that are pointing to a wsus or even a sccm sup,

the installation of the sccm client will take care of updating the registry on the client with the address of the active sup

[CHankins]

One of the hardest things to tackle in SCCM these days is client health. It is an on-going issue because it is hard to diagnose and hard to programmatically fix. SCCM’s client is much improved over older versions but it still has occasional issues and its dependencies such as WMI and Windows Update Agent still have theirs as well.

 

While looking into this for one customer I came up with a trick that won’t solve all client health problems, but it moves one step closer. This trick is for some of the Windows Update Agent (WUA) issues. If anyone uses this and finds issues or improvements please let me know and I will follow-up or correct this post as needed.

 

The first step is to identify the machines having WUA issues. There are probably several ways but what I found useful was to look for clients sending 11416 status messages. Creating a status message query was easy but creating a collection based on status messages takes a little more work to build. Here is one I put together that seems to do the trick:

 

select distinct SYS.Name,SYS.Client from SMS_StatusMessage as stat join sms_r_system as SYS on stat.machinename = SYS.name where stat.ModuleName = "SMS Client" and stat.MessageID = 11416 and DateDiff(dd,stat.Time, GetDate()) <1

 

This query gets all the machine names that have sent a 11416 status message in the last day and cross references with the system object for that machine so that a collection of machines can be put together.

 

Once you have your collection of machines identified the next step is to send those machines something to repair WUA. KB971058 has a nice Fix It script that will do this and you can download it from the KB. It is an MSI and in my testing using the default settings seemed to be enough to fix most machines. As an MSI you can have SCCM create your package and program by creating a package from definition and pointing at the MSI file itself. This should give you a silent run option.

 

Once you have the package in place advertise it to your collection created based on the query above and see if that solves your WUA health issues. For my customer we saw a 92% reduction in WUA issues using this method.

 

via > http://blogs.technet.com/michaelgriswold/archive/2010/04/15/auto-fix-wmi.aspx

 

 

Please forgive me but Im new to SCCM and the WQL query language it uses. Ive tried copy/pasting this query into a collection properties but i keep getting a syntax error.

Please help?

[dheinz98366]

In theory this sounds like a great fix, only problem is that when I link to KB971058 I do not see a script or MSI file?

[Jossy George]

Hi,

 

Can I know below query will work with SCCM 2012, For me its throwing error.

 

select distinct SYS.Name,SYS.Client from SMS_StatusMessage as stat join sms_r_system as SYS on stat.machinename = SYS.name where stat.ModuleName = "SMS Client" and stat.MessageID = 11416 and DateDiff(dd,stat.Time, GetDate()) <1

[Eswar Koneti]

try this:

select distinct * from SMS_StatusMessage where SMS_StatusMessage.MessageID = 11416 and SMS_StatusMessage.ModuleName = "SMS Client"

and DateDiff(dd,SMS_StatusMessage.Time, GetDate()) <1