SCE Clients Rebooted Despite GPO Schedule (Network Steve Forum)

SCE Clients Rebooted Despite GPO Schedule

I have my GPO setup to schedule installs on Wednesdays at 3 am. Today, I found that some servers and some workstations restarted at around 9 am or shortly after which is not what my schedule is configured for.

What could cause this?

June 15th, 2011 8:45pm

Hello,

Did you set a deadline for an update?

The installation schedule of an approved update depends on whether you set an installation deadline for the update and on the Automatic Updates settings:

If you set a deadline, the update is automatically installed during the next check-in from the client computer. And if the deadline has expired, the WUA will not give the user the "Restart Now" option, because the deadline is of the utmost priority than any user preference.
If you did not set a deadline, the installation time depends on how Automatic Updates is configured on the computer:
- If Automatic Updates is configured to automatically download and install at a certain time, the update installs automatically at that time unless the user manually installs it before that time.
- If Automatic Updates is configured for automatic download and manual install, the user can install the update at anytime.

For your information, you can use different update deployment settings for servers to increase the servers' availability. For example, your servers should only download and notify the administrator but not install any update automatically. Or you can enable "No auto-restart for scheduled Automatic Updates installations". Read the following article for details:

You want different update deployment settings for servers and clients?
http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenteressentials/archive/2010/02/17/you-want-different-update-deployment-settings-for-servers-and-clients.aspx

Thanks,

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June 17th, 2011 9:38am

Hi,

As this thread has been quiet for a while, we assume that the issue has been resolved. At this time, we will mark it as "Answered" as the previous steps should be helpful for many similar scenarios.

In addition, we’d love to hear your feedback about the solution. By sharing your experience you can help other community members facing similar problems.

Thanks,

June 21st, 2011 11:01am

Yog,

Sorry for the silence on this thread but could you tell me how to confirm if I have a deadline set? I believe I don't and I just configured my updates to install on a certain day at 3 am, so that's what I expect. This time around, the updates did not install even when users were not logged into their workstations and servers had the same problem...instead of installing at 3 am they started to install randomly starting at 9 am on the day that I was called by our staff users asking why where updates running during the day and forced them to install without giving them the option to postpone the update.

I don't have my updates configured to give them this option because I wanted them to be installed at 3 am. They should be logged off and if they are not then they are not following the rules which makes their complaint a non-issue. This was a legit complaint because for the 1st time since I've installed SCE 2010 this happened during the day and I haven't changed anything and this was working correctly.

So, if I don't have a deadline set which I believe that's the case and I do have them set to install at 3 am on a particular day then the mystery is...why did the updates run at a different time?

I will follow the blog on how to separate servers and clients, so they can install/update differently but even if I didn't want to do this I want to know why this happened.

Thanks for your help.

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June 21st, 2011 2:04pm

I replied but I still haven't heard back regarding this problem? It actually did this again the following week even after I changed the Group Policy to install at 3 am on Sunday...the updates still ran on Wed. morning and they started running again during normal business hours.

I don't know what's going on but I would appreciate some help here. I want to make sure that updates run automatically after they are approved but only based on the schedule that I give them via Group Policy. As a backup, I may consider giving the clients the option to postpone updates which I really don't want to do but I'm open to suggestions to resolve this problem.

I'm losing faith in SCE 2010 to manage my updates at this time.

July 3rd, 2011 6:12pm

To anyone that could help, my Automatic Updates are not working right...they were then they stopped and now even when I change Group Policy schedule the updates continue to be installed and clients rebooted on the original schedule.

After I make the changes to group policy, force the changes on the client, can see on the client that those changes are active and have taken affect, the client continues to reboot on the old original schedule so the bottom line is...it's not recognizing the changes and I'm not sure what's going on.

Any help would be appreciated it before I have to call Microsoft to have this resolved.

Thank you!

Free Windows Admin Tool Kit Click here and download it now

July 13th, 2011 2:41pm

I never got any help on this, so I decided to get rid of SCE 2010 and use a different tool for installing my updates. So, this issue is unresolved but done at this time. Actually, this happened a long time ago but I just got back to my threads and found this old one that was never answered.