I know this is a SharePoint blog but I know many of you (like me) are in charge of installing patches/updates on the SharePoint servers. With Office Online Server, Microsoft Identity Manager, Workflow Manager and all of the SharePoint Farm Servers, I manage a total of 12 servers for Production and 3 development servers. ALL are running Windows Server 2016.
These updates take many MANY hours (say between 4-8 hours depending on other updates included). This is not good for production servers to be down for this long even when we run them after hours. This happens with or without utilizing WSUS (Windows Server Update Services). In the process of updating the servers, I also am forced to restart 2-3 times which is also frustrating.
After days of research and not finding any answers, I decided to open a Microsoft ticket to see if they had any tips to make it go faster. As it turns out, there is a known issue and they provided a workaround. Wow, it would’ve been nice to have known this before! I spent hours every month patching these servers. When I researched before, I saw many upset server admins who were also frustrated so I hope I’m able to help someone with this issue. The workaround provided is temporary as supposedly they are to release a fix early next year but it needs to be ran before EVERY patching session until then. Updates still take a little while but this fix has cut my patching to less than half the time as before. I was able to complete some servers in 1.5 hours which is so much better than before.
The Microsoft tech also said to check services to ensure Windows Modules Installer is running as well.
Below is what he said to do:
This is currently a known issue when the patches apply to the server are considered express.cab, as the one below:
| 2019-08-19 14:54:50, Info CBS Extracting all files from cabinet \\?\C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download\02376742ab3107e647f54bce4ee442a5\Windows10.0-KB4512495-x64-express.cab |
The workaround provided by the product group is rename SoftwareDistribution, and Catroot2:
Run the below commands to rename the SoftwareDistribution and Catroot2:
net stop wuauserv
net stop bits
net stop appidsvc
net stop trustedinstaller
ren C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution SoftwareDistribution.old
ren C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\cbs.log cbs_prev.log
net stop cryptsvc
ren C:\Windows\System32\catroot2 catroot2.old
Enable services again:
net start bits
net start wuauserv
net start appidsvc
net start cryptsvc
Note: When I ran these commands this month, it could not rename the files since they were already renamed. He said I can still run the commands to ensure services are started. He also mentioned that in WSUS, I can ensure that express updates are not ran (I don’t run our WSUS server but I did forward this information to them as well).
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