1:00 AM
El DiPablo
The other day I was getting ready to do my weekly approvals for Windows updates using our WSUS servers. Just as I was getting ready to do that one of the downstream servers went down in one of our remote offices. I called the local site liaison and asked her to power it back on. When It came back up, I remoted in to see if there was anything wrong. That is when I discovered it… WSUS had been uninstalled! WTF?!?!
Okay, it was time to calm down. I checked the logs and didn’t see anything about who or why WSUS was uninstalled. That also wasn’t my immediate concern though. The immediate concern was that I had some approvals to make, and patches to deploy. No server, no patches. no patches and my systems would be vulnerable.
No, I had to re-install Windows Server Update Services 3.0 so that particular region could get their updates. No problem right? Wrong, when I tried to re-install WSUS I got the following error:
Windows Server Update Services 3.0
There is a problem with this WIndows Installer package. A program run as part of the setup did not finish as expected. Contact your support personnel or package vendor.
That was disappointing. I did a search for that error online, and didn’t find out too much. I decided to check the install logs and found the following error code in there:
Error 0x80070643
Once again, I searched online and didn’t find out much except a related article saying that 0x80070643 had something to do with a problem installing MSDE 2000. How could that be though right? WSUS 3.0 doesn’t use MSDE.
I decided to double check Add and Remove Programs. Sure enough, there was no installation of MSDE, however I did find something else. A little application called Windows Internal Database. I hadn’t heard of that, so once again I hit up Google. The first article was from Wikipedia. This is an excerpt from Wikipedia:
Windows Internal Database (codenamed WYukon, sometimes referred to as SQL Server Embedded Edition) is a variant of SQL Server Express 2005 that is included with Windows Server 2008, and is included with other free Microsoft products released after 2007 that require an SQL Server database backend. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Windows Server Update Services 3.0 both include Windows Internal Database, which can be used as an alternative to using a retail edition of SQL Server.
A ha! there was the culprit! I decided to uninstall Windows Internal Database and reboot the server. After the reboot, WSUS re-installed without any issues at all! Booya!
Now I just have to find out why/how it got uninstalled in the first place…
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