INSTALLING WINDOWS XP PROFESSIONAL FROM AN EXISTING OPERATING SYSTEMIF...

2-45Lesson 6 Activating and Updating Windows XP Professional

Software Update Services (SUS) is a server component installed on a Windows 2000 or

Windows 2003 server inside the corporate firewall. SUS allows for the distribution of crit-

ical updates and security updates; it does not allow the distribution of Service Packs or

driver updates, and it does not have a mechanism to deploy software packages outright.

SUS synchronizes with the public Windows Update site at Microsoft on behalf of your

clients. SUS, which is designed to support up to 15,000 clients, serves as a distribution

point of updates to the clients in your organization in two ways:

Automatically You can create an automatic content distribution point on the SUS

server that will synchronize its content with the content from the Windows Update

website. This option offers clients the same updates as the public server, but cuts

down on Internet traffic by providing the updates locally.

Manually You can also create a content distribution point on a server running

Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) version 5.0 or later. This option lets

you specify which updates are available.

You can also control which server each Windows client connects to for updates (if you

are running more than one SUS server across multiple sites), as well as schedule when

the client should perform the installations of critical updates.

Installing SUS

You can install the Software Update Services server component on a server running

either Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003. The computer should meet the

following system requirements:

■

Pentium III 700 MHz or better processor

■

512 MB of RAM

■

6 GB of available hard disk space formatted with NTFS

■

Windows 2000 Server (with Service Pack 2 or later) or Windows Server 2003

■

IIS 5.0 or later

■

Internet Explorer 6.0 or later

The SUS component is available for download from (https://traloihay.net

windows2000/windowsupdate/sus/default.asp). After the download is complete, dou-

ble-click the setup file to begin the installation process and simply follow the menu

prompts for a Typical installation (a Custom installation lets you choose the folder

where the service is installed and the location where updates are stored).

To Use Group Policy to Configure Clients to Access SUS

After SUS is installed in your environment, you need to configure the client systems to

use it—otherwise, they will just keep using the Windows Update public server instead.