In this lecture, I am going to be showing you what to do when your WSUS server is stuck when trying to download updates.

In our WSUS we see we have 2 updates that need to be downloaded.

If we click on Refresh at the right pane under Actions we see it does not update the status.

We have simulated this situation by shutting down the router that connects us to the Internet. That’s why mine is stuck. In a production environment, this can happen sometimes depending on multiple factors.

 We are going to troubleshoot his situation by running wsusutil and we are going to run our reset command. The reset command checks every update metadata row in the database and makes sure it has a corresponding update file stored in the system. If it is missing the update file it goes and downloads the file again.

Open a Command Prompt window. Press the Windows icon in the bottom left and type cmd. Right-click from the list of applications and select Run as administrator.

Change to the directory where the wsusutil is located by typing cd “C:\Program Files\Update Services\Tools”. This location is where WSUS was installed.

Type dir to see what’s inside this directory.

We type wsusUtil.exe reset and press Enter.

Now if we go back to the WSUS console we can see in the Overview section that the downloads are being completed now. The Downloaded indicator is increasing as we click on Refresh from the Actions pane on the right.

We can check later and we will see it will be completed. It will no longer be stuck in 0 MB.

That’s all you need to do if your WSUS server is stuck when you try to download updates.

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