Microsoft Reissues July WSUS Patch

Microsoft Corp. yesterday reissued a July fix for a bug that had prevented some network administrators from using the company’s primary business patch-management tool to deploy security updates.

The patch was posted to Windows Update Tuesday along with a raft of more than two-dozen other fixes. It’s the second time in the past month that Microsoft has addressed an issue with Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), the free add-on to Windows server software that lets companies feed security updates to client systems.

In early June, WSUS administrators discovered that they were unable to push patches to machines that had Office 2003 onboard. Microsoft determined that a synchronization bug in a recent Office 2003 Service Pack 1 update was at fault and promised a fix.

Although it delivered a patch July 10, the next day it acknowledged some administrators running WSUS on Windows Server 2008 had problems after installing the fix. “In order to successfully install this update, you must run the update as an administrator,” said Microsoft in an advisory at the time.

On Aug. 1, Microsoft quietly reissued the patch – tweaked so it would install on Server 2008 – and posted it on the company’s download center.

Yesterday, Microsoft added the revised WSUS patch to Windows Update to make it available for automatic download and installation.

Administrators who manually downloaded and installed the repatch between Aug. 1 and Tuesday, of course, do not need to do so again via Windows Update, Microsoft noted in a revised security advisory.

The just-patched problem was the second found in WSUS during June. Earlier that month, some enterprises running System Center Configuration Manager 2007 were unable to push patches to end users’ machines. That bug was also traced to Office 2003 Service Pack 1, Microsoft later said. It has refused to link the two issues, saying only that there were “similarities in the contributing factors” in both.