forums.wsusoffline.net

Hi and before all congratulations to all the people involved in developing this marvellous program. I am all the day installing new virtual machines and physical computers and it's so useful to me having all them updated easily.

Here goes my question: I have a huge database of downloaded updates on WSUS Offline "client" directory. Two weeks ago I moved them all into a hard disk drive, then realised that the HDD is suspicious of malfunction, so I recovered all the files as soon as I could. But when I moved them into a new secure HDD and i performed an integrity check with WinRAR I found that many files were reported as damaged. Now I don't know what to do, I mean, first of all Winrar may be reporting false positives (I have seen WinRAR not handling many correct self extracting cabinets), and there are also lots of msis and other file types that winrar can't check.

I am afraid of causing damage to my machines installing updates from my corrupted repository. I have realised that WSUS download interface says "downloading/validating...", that means that the program checks the integrity of the existing files (via CRC or any like that) before skipping downloading a file? Does it check ALL the downloaded files? Because in that case I can do a complete download then continue using my database with security, otherway I shall delete my entire database then download all again.

Looking forward for a clear answer. Lots of thanks and sorry for my bad english.
Yours

Hi.
If you have checked the verifying option the repository should be fine.
For more security you can delete all files in the client\md folder and run the generator again, the update-installation-files should be verified and the files in client\md will be rebuild.
For most security you have to reload all updates, but i think that´s not necessary.
Sorry for my bad english too

Hope it´s correct what i wrote, maybe someone other knews more?

I'm very glad of your reponse but I still having two doubts:

First, I think that verify downloaded files means that checks files when downloading them, not the yet downloaded ones (I hope you're right, that will solve my problem).
Last, I don't understand what will happen if I delete all files in client\cmd\ directory. What's the goal of doing that?

Thanks for helping

Hello,

if you delete old updates in the client-directory, missing updates will be downloaded again.
If you are not sure, which files are all corrupted, then this will be the best way to solve it.
But don't forget to activate the verifying of the files.

Oh no! ...

Sorry for bothering again but...I checked 'verify' box, and now I got a warning message: md\hashes-wsus.txt not found.

Where can I download this file?

asdf.wou wrote:Oh no! ...

Sorry for bothering again but...I checked 'verify' box, and now I got a warning message: md\hashes-wsus.txt not found.

Where can I download this file?

This file (and the other hashes files) can be downloaded NOWHERE. They will be build at the first download with activated verify option and even checked at every further download with activated verify option! If there are any problems with these files simply delete them, they will be rebuild at the next download. And please don´t post in seveal threads for the same issue.

rednaxela wrote:

asdf.wou wrote:Oh no! ...

Sorry for bothering again but...I checked 'verify' box, and now I got a warning message: md\hashes-wsus.txt not found.

Where can I download this file?

This file (and the other hashes files) can be downloaded NOWHERE. They will be build at the first download with activated verify option and even checked at every further download with activated verify option! If there are any problems with these files simply delete them, they will be rebuild at the next download. And please don´t post in seveal threads for the same issue.

Sorry a lot, done this because I didn't know in which thread should i post it. So, validate checkbox is meant to check integrity of existing downloads, no for the new files you download, I mean if there is an error on download and file is corrupt, it will be created a hash that will be considered ok, and the file will never be reported as damaged... Did I undserstand it ok?

The hashes itself are for maintaining integrity from one session to the next. If a new file arrives corrupted, then the signature check should catch it, as corrupted updates have an invalid signature.

Funny fact: The updates' filenames contain their SHA1 hash. Maybe WSUSOU could use this to its advantage one day...

Example: windows6.1-kb971468-x86_79bba3989c41d43fce69d5d04709f061c3c6f5f5.cab