How to safely decline the already approved updates in WSUS 3.0

Hello Everyone,
I have couple of updates that I have already approved manually initially for
couple of different classifications like SQL etc. Now the database size has
grown enormous and I wanted to devise a mechanism for declining those
approved but unused updates . Although superseded and expired updates are
taken care of but the updates not within these two categories are still lying
there. Also I need to make sure that these updates do not turn around again
once I decline and purge them.

Any pointers would be much appreciated.

"ikafridi" <ikafridi@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:B5EED5FB-570A-4F9B-B44E-EC8A0A5A313A@microsoft.com...
> Hello Everyone,
> I have couple of updates that I have already approved manually initially
> for
> couple of different classifications like SQL etc. Now the database size
> has
> grown enormous and I wanted to devise a mechanism for declining those
> approved but unused updates . Although superseded and expired updates are
> taken care of but the updates not within these two categories are still
> lying
> there. Also I need to make sure that these updates do not turn around
> again
> once I decline and purge them.
>
> Any pointers would be much appreciated.

Perhaps try the WSUS Newsgroup (xposted for convenience)

On the web:
http://www.microsoft.com/communities... date_services

In your newsreader:
news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsof...pdate_services

[TaurArian cross-posted to .update_services]

> "ikafridi" <ikafridi@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

>> Hello Everyone,
>> I have couple of updates that I have already approved manually initially
>> for
>> couple of different classifications like SQL etc. Now the database size
>> has
>> grown enormous and I wanted to devise a mechanism for declining those
>> approved but unused updates.

I'm not sure I understand the problem. You know how to decline an update?
Select one or more updates, right-click and choose Decline.

>> Also I need to make sure that these updates do not turn around
>> again once I decline and purge them.

I'm not aware of any circumstances in which a declined update will spontaneously
re-approve itself.

Be cautious about what you decline, as declined updates will not be detected as
needed even if they are.

Harry.

Hi Harry,

Thanks for your post.I should I have been more elaborative on this. Yes I do
know about how to decline the patches but my problem is I am having number of
patches with database of upstream server touching >100 GB. I have declined
superseded and expired updates but there are thousands of other updates that
are unusable to my environment like SQL, Windows server 2008 64 bit etc. I
used to approve all the patches that comes under my selected classification
but now I wanted to decline them and finally purge them from database.

Thanks,
Imran

"Harry Johnston [MVP]" wrote:

> [TaurArian cross-posted to .update_services]
>
> > "ikafridi" <ikafridi@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:
>
> >> Hello Everyone,
> >> I have couple of updates that I have already approved manually initially
> >> for
> >> couple of different classifications like SQL etc. Now the database size
> >> has
> >> grown enormous and I wanted to devise a mechanism for declining those
> >> approved but unused updates.
>
> I'm not sure I understand the problem. You know how to decline an update?
> Select one or more updates, right-click and choose Decline.
>
> >> Also I need to make sure that these updates do not turn around
> >> again once I decline and purge them.
>
> I'm not aware of any circumstances in which a declined update will spontaneously
> re-approve itself.
>
> Be cautious about what you decline, as declined updates will not be detected as
> needed even if they are.
>
> Harry.
>

ikafridi wrote:

> Thanks for your post.I should I have been more elaborative on this. Yes I do
> know about how to decline the patches but my problem is I am having number of
> patches with database of upstream server touching >100 GB.

I assume you mean the content store rather than the actual database?

> I have declined
> superseded and expired updates but there are thousands of other updates that
> are unusable to my environment like SQL, Windows server 2008 64 bit etc. I
> used to approve all the patches that comes under my selected classification
> but now I wanted to decline them and finally purge them from database.

For the record, I don't usually recommend declining updates, although I believe
I'm in the minority here. The reason is that if an update is declined, you
won't get any warning if it turns out it was actually still needed after all.
(This may not apply if you're using a separate tool to check compliance.) One
option in your situation would be to decline the unwanted updates, then set them
all back to "unapproved" once you've purged the content.

To answer your question:

Probably the best approach would be to decline the updates by hand. I think
you'll find that if you set "Group By" to Classification (from the Action menu)
and then sort by title that most of the updates you'll want to decline are
clustered together, and it won't take nearly as long as you might think.

Theoretically you could write code to sort it for you, but it would almost
certainly be faster to do it yourself.

Harry.