Problems with WSUS Admin Consoles. Or, Microsoft Admits an Oops.
If you've been having problems with WSUS recently, it may not have been your fault. From the WSUS Team Blog:
We have been hearing reports from some customers who use WSUS that they have been having trouble accessing their administration consoles. We have confirmed the cause of this issue and fixed it on our servers, which will automatically fix the issue for most customers on their next synchronization cycle. This post will explain the issue in detail and provide steps customers can take to get WSUS working again even sooner.The cause of this issue is that, on Sunday evening, Microsoft renamed a product category entry for Forefront to clarify the scope of updates that will be included in the future. 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 5pm Sunday and 11am Monday Pacific Time.
Read on for more...
Microsoft continues:
We renamed the category to eliminate the double quotes on Monday morning at 11am after investigating and validating the problem. This will fix the issue for any impacted WSUS server the next time it synchronizes with Microsoft’s servers. We are also improving our publishing tools to make sure that issues like this are caught during the publishing process, before they impact customers.It’s important to note that WSUS customers whose servers did not synchronize during this time, or end users connecting directly with Windows Update, Microsoft Update, or Automatic Updates are not impacted by this issue.
The post provides a command line-based fix for those that are experiencing the problem. That fix effectively forces the WSUS server to re-synch so it can pick up the corrected data. You can get that fix at this address:
http://blogs.technet.com/wsus/archive/2007/11/13/unexpected-ui-errors-in-wsus.aspx
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