Microsoft fixes WSUS malfunction in time for Patch Tuesday

14.11.2007
For the second time in less than three weeks, Microsoft Corp. has had to apologize for blunders made by the application that enterprise administrators rely on to deploy the software vendor's security patches and other updates.

Late Monday, Bobbie Harder, a senior program manager with MicrosoftMicrosoft's Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) group, confirmed the latest gaffe in a posting to a company blog. Alles zu Microsoft auf CIO.de

"Sunday evening, Microsoft renamed a product category entry for Forefront to clarify the scope of updates that will be included in the future," Harder said. "Unfortunately the category name that was used included the word Nitrogen in double quotes (appearing as "Nitrogen"). A double quote is a restricted character within WSUS, which created an error condition on the administration console. This issue occurred on many WSUS servers that synchronized with Microsoft servers between 5 p.m. Sunday and 11 a.m. Monday, Pacific time."

Monday morning, network administrators at Microsoft user companies began posting messages to WSUS support forums after they arrived at work to find the patch delivery software's management console reporting an error, essentially blocking them from retrieving updates.

The timing couldn't have been worse, as Microsoft is scheduled to deliver its monthly security fixes later Tuesday.

Harder said the glitch was fixed Monday afternoon and would be propagated to each WSUS server the next time it synchronized with Microsoft's update servers. She also provided instructions for administrators who have set WSUS to sync manually, with separate steps for WSUS 2.0 and WSUS 3.0.

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