inside the brain

This bit me in the ass today so to save you pain in the future here is how you go about fixing it.

When looking at the SUS console you may see machines appearing and disappearing at random or what looks like they are even replacing each other (ie you force wuauclt on one box, see it appear, do the same on another box and while box 2 appears, box 1 disappears).

This could also be a very big problem as if clients share the same SUSClientID they will join groups they are not meant to be in and may download patches/releases not intended for them.

In order to generate a “unique” SUSClientID you need to do the following:

net stop wuauserv

Open up regedit and find the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate

Delete the following entries:

* PingID
* AccountDomainSid
* SusClientId
* SusClientIDValidation

net start wuauserv

wuauclt.exe /resetauthorization /detectnow