# WSUS and the dreaded "Connection Error"



## zx10guy (Mar 30, 2008)

For those that are running or plan to run WSUS (Windows Server Update Services), you may or will run into an issue where the MMC plug in to bring up the WSUS administration tool fails. You'll get a Connection Error message and a button to reset the connection to the server. Sometimes the reset works but many times it will not. I've searched high and low prior and was lead astray with various suggestions such as it being the included SQL server not being able to handle a large download of needed files for a particular synchronization. After trying to chunk up the downloads to a smaller slice and it not working, I tried a fresh install of Windows Server. When I first built a WSUS server, it was on Server 2012R2. I thought maybe a newer Windows Server version would fix this problem. So I tried Server 2016. Same issue. I then tried Server 2019 and again same issue.

After tons of frustration and knowing there are tons of WSUS deployments out in the wild, I did more searching looking for a solution. I happen to finally stumble on the actual fix. It was someone's blog entry where they discussed my very problem and it turns out to be an IIS issue; particularly a memory allocation problem. IIS is installed as part of the WSUS installation if it isn't installed already. The default setting for the amount of memory IIS can use is undersized for what WSUS needs. To fix this you have to change this parameter. The below link is the actual article I used to fix my problem:

https://www.stephenwagner.com/2019/05/14/wsus-iis-memory-issue-error-connection-error/

For those that don't understand why anyone would want to run WSUS, this service/feature allows you to download all patches and updates from Microsoft's update servers into one spot on your network. If you have quite a few Windows boxes to a ton, having one server internally will save you Internet contention issues. However, to get your Windows OS' to use your WSUS server, you have to either push a GPO from your domain controller to the member workstations/servers or do a registry modification. I chose to do a registry modification which allows me to not need to join all my Windows boxes to my domain controller.


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## lochlomonder (Jul 24, 2015)

I had this all set up and working correctly using the reg fix on our 2012 DC. Of course, did I remember to do that when we moved the DC over to 2016? Of course not! Thankfully, I'm a browser pack-rat and have everything sub-divided in folders, so it didn't take me too long to find the solution again.


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