Microsoft- thanks for the response. we don't have automatic updates turned on for any of our servers. we use a tool called "BigFix" to deploy OS security and rollup packages. this allows us to do it in a controlled fashion as we have quite a few servers to update each month and our reboot times need to be controlled. anyway, the point really is that we don't have automatic updates on any of our OS's. yet, the 2016 and 2019 servers are able to update their defs and engines w/out intervention. when we started deploying Defender (preview) on 2012r2, however, we are trying to understand what we need to do to get the updates in an automated fashion. I did set up a file share and created the task to update the files in that share location and then updated group policy to include that file share location to see if works. i did a gpupdate /force but nothing happened as far as getting updates, but I do see it configured in the gpo when I do an rsop. When I ran a manual pull the server did look to the file share first and updated. I just need to understand how that'll happen automatically.
