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Clients cannot registered to WSUS console

Recently I faced an issue with Microsoft’s WSUS update manager and the console on which clients are reporting. In more detail although clients were able to connect and communicate with WSUS server, they could not be registered on the console.

I tried many workarounds that I found online but non of them worked. By troubleshooting further I was able to detect the issue.

First things first, when you deal with such an issue try ping in order to verify network connectivity and also

Test-NetConnection WSUS_serverIP -port 80 
Test-NetConnection WSUS_serverIP -port 8530 (or 8531 for encrypted)

If you are sure that network and port connectivity is in place run the below powershell command which will generate a log output on your desktop. Try to read the logs and verify the issue.

Get-WindowsUpdateLog

On my case the issue was a proxy that did not allow communication to WSUS web service which performs the necessary tasks in order for the machine to be registered on the console.

Below is the command to reset web proxy settings on a windows server 2016 machine.

Bonus content:

After the successful removal of proxy I restarted the windows update setting and it got stuck on a server with the state of stopping.

You can kill a stuck service on Windows with the below command on an elevated prompt:

taskkill /F /FI "SERVICES eq wuauserv"

I used wuauserv as it is the name of windows update service