WSUS Fails to Connect

Recently I had a WSUS server which had to be rebooted.  Upon restarting the server, I noticed that I could no longer get into the WSUS console.  When trying to connect I was receiving the following error message:

Checking the Event Logs, I found two events which showed the following:

My next step was to check the health of WSUS with the following command:

WsusUtil.exe checkhealth
This was run from "C:\Program Files\Update Services\Tools" directory

Running this command gave me the following result:

Upon looking into this further, I noticed that there was a Windows Update which has caused some issues in the past for some people.  The update is KB3159706.  I checked my server and I did not  have this update installed, but thought I would humour it and try the fix anyway.  The fix mentioned in the KB article actually resolved the issue.  I did the following to get it back up and running:

1. Install the HTTP Activation role under .NET Framework 4.5 Features through Server Manager.

2. Restart the WSUS service

Yep...it was that easy!  After doing that, adding the WSUS server back into the MMC console worked fine and everything was back up and running again.

Clear the Windows.Old file on C:

If you're like me and you're using an SSD which may not be too large, you might find that there's a significant chunk of data being used up by the Windows.Old file.  This contains rollback data from your previous installation before upgrading to Windows 10.  If you're not planning on rolling back, then I suggest you clear it up and get rid of that wasted data usage.

To do this, you will need to do the following:

1. Run Disk-Clean Up utility from the Start Menu
2. Click Clean up system files

3. Find Previous Windows installations and tick that

4. Click OK and it will clean up all the data on your C: drive that has been wasted in the Windows.Old file.

TFTP Open Timeout - PXE Boot | SCCM 2012 R2

Recently I was setting up PXE booting with SCCM 2012 R2 (new setup).  When starting the client workstation up and pressing F12 to network boot, I got the following error:

Having a look online to find out what this issue was, I struggled to find the exact cause of my particular issue.  There were many blogs and posts about this issue, but nothing referred to a solution which would have helped me.

It turns out that this is a bug with Microsoft and there is a Hot Fix available to download.  The Hot Fix is available here.

After installing this Hot Fix, I rebooted the SCCM server, then attempted to boot to PXE again on the client workstation.  This time it worked perfectly!