My Servers are contacting Windows Update instead of my SCE Server…but why?

I’d actually seen this in the lab when I shut my SCE Server down for the night (my daughter says that contrary to my belief, the humming noise emitted by the server doesn’t lull one to sleep). When the SCE 2007 is down for an extended period, agent-managed machines begin using Windows Update as their source for hotfixes As it turns out, there is a rule in the Essentials Internal Library management pack which checks to see if the client can ping the SCE server. If it cannot ping for 6 hours straight, then the rule redirects the client to the Windows Update site. Once the client can ping the server again, the rule configures the client to use SCE for Windows Updates again. While this would likely be undesirable in an enterprise environment, this is not a bad idea in SCE, which is targeted at the mid-market IT generalist who may lack the time (or expertise in some instances) to keep his eyes on a console all day. Source: SCE beta newsgroups