One of the most common questions I’ve been asked is, “How do I remove SCUP updates from Configuration Manager?”. The answer is fairly easy, you expire the update in SCUP and the re-publish it into WSUS. Then on the next scheduled ConfigMgr/WSUS synchronization the update will be marked as expired in the ConfigMgr UI. Finally after a few weeks the update will be removed from the UI (unless the update is part of a deployment package).
Now this process becomes a little more work if you have deleted the update in SCUP and have no way of getting it back. One thing to remember is that the flow of data is one way, meaning it flows from SCUP to WSUS (through publishing) and from WSUS to ConfigMgr (through synchronization). If you publish an update to WSUS and then delete it from SCUP (before expiring/republishing) then the update will become orphaned in ConfigMgr and there is no easy way to remove it. If you are in this situation the below steps should help remove those orphaned updates.
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The first thing you need to do is find the Update in the ConfigMgr UI that is orphaned as we need to find the Update ID. To display the Update ID in the UI you will need to add a new column for display.
Add the “Update Classification” column to the Displayed columns list.
Now find the orphaned update (probably by title) and note the Update ID
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Once you have the UpdateID you now need to find the InstallableItem ID. To do this you can browse to your WSUS Server’s “UpdateServicesPackages” share. The path is \\<wsus server>\UpdateServicesPackagess\[Update GUID]\[InstallableItem ID GUID]
- Now that you have the UpdateID and InstallableItem ID you can re-create the update. Open SCUP and create a new update with the same title and fill in the required fields. For Installable/Installed Rules you can but in any rules as you are going to expire the update. It does not really matter which rules you use.
- Export this newly created update.
- Delete the new update from SCUP console, don’t worry we will re-import it in a few steps.
- Export/Save the XML file from inside the <catalogname>.cab file for editing.
- Open the XML file in an XML editor if you have one or notepad. If you have an XML editor you can reformat the text for easier reading.
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Modify the PackageID with your orphaned UpdateID and modify the InstallableItem ID with your orphaned InstallableItem ID and save the file.
- CAB the file using the following command – “makecab <filename>.xml <filename>.cab”
- Re-Import the update into SCUP.
- Mark the update as Expired and flag the update for Publish.
- Publish the update.
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Verify in the %user%\updatespublisher.log that the update was expired.
There are a couple of things to remember with managing SCUP updates. Before you delete an update in SCUP make sure you have no use for it in the future. If the update was never published then deleting it is fine, however, if you have published it into WSUS/ConfigMgr then you will want to keep the update or expire it and re-publish before deleting it.