So I got WinSrv2008R2 free, courtesy of Dreamspark, and I’ve been messing around with it. I was thinking of creating a few Win7 VMs to mess around with Domains, Group Policy and the like, and one of the things that I found was some functionality called Windows Server Update Services.
Turns out WSUS is a program which acts as a LAN-sized Windows Update In A Box. I like the idea of optimizing bandwidth used, AND it seems to give me nice pretty graphs of updates that were applied to my laptop when I tried it out. I’m hooking it up to my desktop too, just for the fun of it – mainly because my laptop’s 32 bit while my desktop’s 64 bit, so any architecture specific files need to be downloaded for both.
And then I thought, “Hmm. Why not expand it to the rest of the systems in the house?” All the systems that are actively used are Microsoft-based:
- Study computer? Windows XP (going to upgrade it before I leave for Canada)
- Dad & bro’s laptops? Cheap Acers running Vista Home Premium
- TV computer? Windows 7 Home Premium
- Mum’s laptop? (which she may or may not be leaving in Canada permanently) Windows 7 Home Premium too.
So, clearly, there’s some way to use WSUS at home. I used to go to each of them to manually click the ‘update’ button before giving up and setting Windows Update to automatically update all of them.
Right now the setup I have works. But WSUS is shiny new, so I’m going to mess around with it. It might not last, and I might let it sit there and run, but it’ll be fun to mess around with.