Hello all,

I am running a WSUS server Version: 3.2.7600.226 in a 2003 domain environment with about 2500 client computers. I have a GPO that defines the update schedules for our retail servers. The GPO basically allows the client servers to download approved updates anytime, install said updates every Thursday at 02:00 and wait for a manually executed reboot that takes place at 05:00 the same morning. This timing is important as our retail servers run several nightly transaction processes and have a limited window to reboot. Generally this system works as expected but for the past few months I have seen several but not all servers reboot shortly after the update install at 02:00 or less frequently out of nowhere. I generally understand the deadline mechanics of WSUS as well as WSUS server update priority over client updates but we don't configure our updates with deadlines. I have looked at all of our approved updates past and present and none of them show a configured deadline. These unscheduled reboots severely impact our process and I am taking quite a bit of heat for these events. Does anyone know if there are "default" deadlines that may be configured for say 'critical' updates or some other classification? Looking at my configuration I cannot see any other reason why these clients are being driven to reboot off schedule. I have also considered update dependencies but have not been able to find any supporting documentation. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

• Edited by unimorpheus 9 hours 53 minutes ago

I am running a WSUS server Version: 3.2.7600.226 in a 2003 domain environment with about 2500 client computers.

What OS version is your WSUS?
What OS version are your client machines? (modern OS like Win8/8.1 does things differently, for patch/restarts)

WSUS server version 3.2.7600.226 is rather old/out-of-date ?

...install said updates every Thursday at 02:00 and wait for a manually executed reboot that takes place at 05:00 the same morning. This timing is important as our retail servers run several nightly transaction processes and have a limited window to reboot. Generally this system works as expected but for the past few months I have seen several but not all servers reboot shortly after the update install at 02:00 or less frequently out of nowhere.

The windowsupdate.log, and the event logs, on the client machine, should reveal "what" is going on. That should then allow you to investigate "why" it is going on.

There is some ability to control when the download occurs, and when the installation occurs, but there's less control over when the post-update-restart occurs.