The Realm of the Verbal Processor

SCCM and WSUS issues

[Update June 3, 2008: Refer to this post for issues related to SCCM and WSUS as well. The info in it might be more relevant.]

Lately I have been working with System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (SCCM)…the latest version of Systems Management Server from Microsoft. Wow is this thing powerful. I enjoyed SMS 2003, but SCCM is a huge improvement. The process has not been without speed bumps, but overall it is just simply an awesome framework for computer management.

The most significant speed bump I have had lately has been in the area of computer patching. SCCM uses WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) for its patching component. Basically you install WSUS and SCCM manages WSUS. There are several settings that need to be lined up for this to operate. Links to those settings can be found here, here, and here.

A couple of the things to make sure are in order are:

1. Proxy settings on the SUP properties are set correctly. (Use it or not, and if so make sure it is pointing to the right place.)
2. On the SUP component configuration, ensure that the port numbers are correct. If WSUS is installed to the default web site, the ports should be 80/443. If it is using a custom web site, it defaults to 8530/8531…unless you told it something different. Open IIS Administration to check the properties on the WSUS Administration web site to see what it is set to. Make sure the ports in IIS and the SUP component match.

I had all of those settings lined up per the documentation (no proxy required…ports configured correctly), but was still getting errors. I first reported these issues on myITforum.com and a TechNet forum.

Basic gist is that after setting things up per documentation, SCCM was not able to successfully connect to WSUS and manage the WSUS settings. The SMS_WSUS_SYNC_MANAGER log shows that the synchronization failed because of an HTTP 401 “unauthorized” message. This is followed by another log entry that states “SMS WSUS Synchronization failed” because “WSUS Server not configured”. It also gave the incredibly helpful [sarcasm] error code of “214500037: Unspecified error”.

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October 23, 2007 Posted by Jarvis | ConfigMgr, tech | 19 Comments