Guess Whose Back?

—26/01/07 Correction to the post. It should read TICK the box instead of Clear— 

Back in the office today after a week on holiday. Work was so mad up until i left i didn’t get a chance to post much

I did mention in my last post that i had a problem getting WSUS clients to update.

I finally figured it out!

I had another look through the event log and found the following:

Event ID: 364     Source: Windows Server Update     Category: Synchronization

Content file download failed. Reason: The server does not support the necessary HTTP protocol. Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) requires that the server support the Range protocol header.Source File: /msdownload/update/v5/eula/officexpeula_fin.txt Destination File: e:\WSUS\WsusContent\115D075903CAA57C6F0A64061A2C596B8C601C311.txt.

The sync hadn’t downloaded the files for the updates. The reason i didn’t spot it before was my lack of understanding about WSUS. Since i could see all the updates in the console i initially dismissed this error. Turns out it downloads the details first (the definitions if you will) and then the actual files later.

After a little research it was the Sonicwall firewall that was giving me the problem.

To fix it i did the following

Login to the Sonicwall management webpage

Alter the URL so that you can get at the internal settings..e.g   http://192.168.0.1/diag.html

Find the “Enable HTTP Byte-Range request with Gateway AV” option and TICK the box (i initially was a little sceptical about this as we dont use the Gateway AV feature)

Click APPLY (I didn’t reboot the firewall but it might be a good idea to.)

After this the sync started working fine and the clients started installing updates as they were supposed to

I was annoyed that i had spent so much time trying to figure this one out but i was pleased that i managed to learn just about everything i’ll ever need to know about WSUS (until version 3!)

There is also a Microsoft Knowledgebase article on this. KB922330

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Andy Parkes is Technical Director at Coventry based IT support company IBIT Solutions. Formerly, coordinator of AMITPRO and Microsoft Partner Area Lead for 2012-2013. He also isn't a fan of describing himself in the third person.

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1 thought on “Guess Whose Back?

  • Hey thanks for the info. I’ve been having the same issue with linux updates. Also, I’m not sure if my windows servers were affected as yours were or not, but better check on those too.

    Have a good one.

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