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Microsoft Windows Update and Network Bandwidth?

Posted by Cliff on from the bandwidth-hogs dept.

Brett Glass asks: "As we reviewed the cache statistics for our small ISP today, we noted that the traffic generated by Microsoft's Windows Update feature constituted 45% -- no, that's not a misprint -- of our total throughput. Because so many computers on the Internet run Windows, this massive resource drain occurs whenever Microsoft announces major security holes (as it did this week). The traffic could be greatly reduced, and service to users much improved, if the updates were cacheable at the ISP. But Microsoft has set up the service in such a way that the data can't be cached. (It's digitally signed, so inserting Trojans into the cache is virtually impossible; in any event, no more of an issue than intercepting the data stream.) Are others out there seeing the same pattern? How might Microsoft be convinced to make its updates cacheable, so as not to waste unthinkable amounts of bandwidth?"

6 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. can't be cached? by greck · · Score: 5, Informative

    I can only speak from what I've seen in our offices, but squid (running in transparent proxy mode) very definitely caches content from Windows Update... I set it up about six month ago and remeber being really surprised (because I think I very reasonably expected it not to).

    1. Re:can't be cached? by bobibleyboo · · Score: 5, Informative

      I can also vouch for this I had a Linux Mandrake SNF Server running a transparent squid server (with a little tweaking to the max file size and the average file size) I was able to cut out about 90% of the windows update traffic at the site (The site had about 200 users) none of the transactions where cached but when it came to downloading the updates and service packs it works wonderfully.

    2. Re:can't be cached? by Wolfrider · · Score: 5, Informative

      --Check your squid.conf, and look for # TAG: maximum_object_size (bytes)
      # Objects larger than this size will NOT be saved on disk.

      # maximum_object_size 4096 KB
      maximum_object_size 32767 KB

      --
      .
      == WolfriderV6 == I'm willing to admit that *I just might* be wrong... Are you??
  2. Several options available by questionlp · · Score: 5, Informative
    There are a couple of options that you can choose to help reduce the amount of bandwidth used to pull down and install Windows Updates. The first one, which is available for free and runs on Windows 2000 Server, is Microsoft's Software Update Services which allows you to create a local store of the updates (for any language and all supported platforms) and point the client Windows Update to the internal server. It's not perfect but it works in a lot of cases.

    Another option is to use a systems management package (LANDesk, ZENworks, SMS, etc.) to build the packages and deploy them while only using your internal network bandwidth (once you've downloaded the hotfixes anyway).

    Of course, the two options above are really meant for company networks, but even those can help reduce the bandwidth used for more important things.

  3. Out of my experience by jsse · · Score: 5, Informative
    Yes you can't cache it. That save Microsoft a lot of trouble and the trouble is on you. :)

    First step is to download the patches/update manually and save them elsewhere accessable to all users:

    Second, we found that users would rather use windowsupdate.microsoft.com then to go to our patches/update repository, that make sense. You could forbid your users from accessing windowsupdate.microsoft.com, but it might have a problem, as some update might actually request windowsupdate.microsoft.com during installation.

    Therefore, we limit the priority of traffic in/out of windowsupdate.microsoft.com. Eventually we lower the prior of entire microsoft.com because that's really necessary. Users could access to windowsupdate.microsoft.com on their own as usual - if they don't mind holding up their machines for a couple of days. :)

    This works great. Larger and bigger patches are stored locally for users, while they could still access to windowsupdate for smaller patches/fixes. Our bandwidth load lessen(to a certain degree, we still can't solve that 5-15% Netbios traffic jam :)

    Hope this help.
  4. Software Update Services by superyooser · · Score: 5, Informative
    Microsoft used to have a corporate Windows Update site where you could download all the patches as executable files. That site was retired last year in favor of something called Software Update Services. It requires running a SUS server and appears to distribute the updates only to systems running Windows 2000 or later.

    In the meantime, you should be aware that all the major service packs for Microsoft products can be downloaded as stand-alone executables. Also, the IE download page includes some critical updates. Make your own "cache" on the network, and let everybody get their updates from there.