Software Updates Says Unknown 

Ok, what does this mean, how do I figure out where the problem is? Man, what a pain!

Below is an example (PIC 1) of what I’m talking about with the “Unknown”. These “Unknown” machines mean they didn’t send in the Software Update scan on the workstation to the WSUS system. Now, which machines are these? Where do I go? To answer these questions, scroll down to your REPORTING, then REPORTS section and run the following report “Scan 2 – Last scan states by site” under “Software Updates – D. Scan” category, as shown in (PIC 2). After you run the report, you’ll notice a section called “Unknown”, and now open that section and view the “Unknowns”.

To resolve this or at least figure out what’s causing your problems, do the following steps:

1. Go to the client and open the c:\windows\Windowsupdate.log. It’s best if you can open this log from a machine that has SMS Trace installed. You can view the errors much easier as shown in (PIC 3).
   
2. Next look in the c:\windows\system32\ccm\logs\WUAHandler.log and view your errors as shown in (PIC 4).
   
3. Then if everything does look good, go to look in the Statesys.log in the SCCM server logs to see if the messages have been updated on the server. If you need to run this manually, you Right Click on Software Updates then click on Run Homepage Summarization, wait a few seconds or check your Statesys.log and then refresh Software Updates and you should see the numbers change.
   
4. If none of this is working, then you need to go to the client and from the control panel –> double click on Configuration Manager –> Click on Actions tab –> Click on Software Updates Scan Cycle and click on Initiate Action. Then check if everything is updating correctly with your logs as stated in step 1 and proceeding to step 3.
   

PIC 1

PIC 2

PIC 3

PIC 4