Hi,
Thanks very much for reading this. For several years I've been using the WSUS on my Small Business Server 2008. It synchronises at 3am and updates my server at 5am Saturdays and my client PC's at 6am Tuesdays. It has been working fine since 2009.
We have just been infected by a virus which affected service.exe. I managed to get rid of the virus by downloading a clean version of service.exe from a backup. I used Task Manager to stop service.exe and then managed to quickly copy the clean services.exe file into C:\windows\system32 which got rid of the virus.
I've now noticed the WSUS is not working. When I run the SBS Console and go to Security -> Updates and try to check the Update status I get the following message:-
"The windows server update services service is not running".
Server Manager also shows the "Update Services" service is not running as does the Services console.
I can start the "Update Services" service by clicking Start. The service will run for a few minutes but then stops again. When I look at the reason for it stopping using Server Manager I see the message:-
"Service failed to initialise correctly"
What would be the best way to proceed:-
1) FIX IT: Is there a fix for the problem with the "Update Services" service keeps stopping?
2) REMOVE WSUS Role: I've always hated the way the WSUS Role on a SBS insists on downloading updates for every single Microsoft product!! You cant specify the products you want updates for otherwise the WSUS doesn't work. Even after running a WSUS Cleanup I still have 70GB of WSUS data. I thought I might uninstall the WSUS Role and update my Server and client PC's manually.
QUESTION: If I remove the WSUS Role will it affect anything else on my SBS? I went 90% though the process of removing the WSUS Role via Server Manager. I ticked the three boxes to say I also wanted to remove WSUS data and Log files etc. I was just about to proceed when I saw the message "Removing the WSUS might stop other programs etc. from working". This message worried me. I know it's standard practice to show a message saying that uninstalling a role might stop other things from working but I thought it best to check on this forum first if anyone knows of any reason that I shouldn't completely remove the WSUS Role.
3) STOP IT: I've read a safe option is just to STOP the Update Services service and set it to DISABLED. Would this be best? Would disabling the Update Services service affect anything else? Of course, in comparison, the advantage of removing the WSUS role completely would be to free up approx 70GB of space that WSUS is currently hogging on my server. Merely disabling the service wont free up any disk space.
So, should I...
1) Fix it
2) Remove it
3) Stop it
4) Anything else?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks - David