WSUS and SUS are great ways of managing the deployment of operating system updates. This is a technology that a lot of the time is only available to domain users, but why should they get all of the fun? Even in some small workgroup environments there are benefits to being able to automatically handle updates.

In order to do this, create a text file with a .reg extension and put the following in it:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate]
"WUServer"="yoursusserver"
"WUStatusServer"="yoursusserver"
"ElevateNonAdmins"=dword:00000001
"TargetGroupEnabled"=dword:00000001
"TargetGroup"="Workstations"


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU]
"NoAUShutdownOption"=dword:00000000
"AutoInstallMinorUpdates"=dword:00000001
"NoAUAsDefaultShutdownOption"=dword:00000001
"NoAutoRebootWithLoggedOnUsers"=dword:00000001
"RescheduleWaitTimeEnabled"=dword:00000001
"RescheduleWaitTime"=dword:00000001
"UseWUServer"=dword:00000001
"NoAutoUpdate"=dword:00000000
"AUOptions"=dword:00000004
"ScheduledInstallDay"=dword:00000000
"ScheduledInstallTime"=dword:00000010
"DetectionFrequencyEnabled"=dword:00000001
"DetectionFrequency"=dword:00000016
"RebootWarningTimeoutEnabled"=dword:00000001
"RebootWarningTimeout"=dword:00000005
"RebootRelaunchTimeoutEnabled"=dword:00000001
"RebootRelaunchTimeout"=dword:0000000a

Once you have done this, simply run this .reg file on each target computer in your workgroup and they should begin getting updates from your WSUS or SUS server.

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Chris Sanders is the network administrator for one of the largest public school systems in the state of Kentucky. Chris is the author of the book Practical Packet Analysis as well as several articles. His personal website at www.chrissanders.org contains a great deal of information, articles, and guides related to network administration, network security, packet analysis, and general information technology.