automatic updates fail behind proxy server

Automatic Updates don't work on computers inside our network. The shield icon
will occasionally show up in the taskbar but it will always hang at about 8%
complete when downloading updates. The event logs on our Windows machines are
filled with "Unable to connect: Unable to connect to the automatic updates
service" messages from the Windows Update Service. Browsing to the Windows
Update website manually works fine but its not practical to have to do this
for every computer.

Does anyone have any suggestions to get the updates working through the
proxy? Is there any other way of automatically distributing updates to
multiple machines? We don't have any Windows servers (and don't want any) so
there's no way we can use Systems Update Server or whatever. All of the
workstations in question are Windows XP Pro.

"tim234",

Yes, I have a few suggestions that I think would help you:

1. On your firewall, create a "Trusted Sites" object related to Windows
Update that is easy to remember.
a. Try to create just one, so that you can easily manipulate this over
time.
b. There should be only 3 domains allowed in this object:
http://*.windowsupdate.microsoft.com
https://*.windowsupdate.microsoft.com
http://download.windowsupdate.com

2. Also on your firewall, create an "Exceptions" object related to Windows
Update.
a. Create just one
b. Use the exact same list of domains as in Step 1b.
c. Make sure that your Exception object also excepts the following
services:
1. Win32 Generic Service (svchost.exe)
2. WinHTTP (this is usually allowed by default)
3. Wininet (this also is usually allowed by default)

Try this and let us know how this goes.

Sincerely,

Pat Walters [MSFT]


"tim234" <> wrote in message
news:37DC6F15-82B5-40FB-8AF0-...
> Automatic Updates don't work on computers inside our network. The shield
icon
> will occasionally show up in the taskbar but it will always hang at about
8%
> complete when downloading updates. The event logs on our Windows machines
are
> filled with "Unable to connect: Unable to connect to the automatic updates
> service" messages from the Windows Update Service. Browsing to the Windows
> Update website manually works fine but its not practical to have to do
this
> for every computer.
>
> Does anyone have any suggestions to get the updates working through the
> proxy? Is there any other way of automatically distributing updates to
> multiple machines? We don't have any Windows servers (and don't want any)
so
> there's no way we can use Systems Update Server or whatever. All of the
> workstations in question are Windows XP Pro.