How do I get windowsupdate.log from a remote device without psremoting enabled? - ANSWERED

[PaulKlerkx]

Hi, Before I get started, I should point out that the error message shown in the Wuahandler.log (0x8024000e) is one I have tried troubleshooting and not found a solution to, so for this post, I am just wanting to know how to get windowsupdate.log from a remote computer without powershell.  We regularly get messages on machines that have failed updates in Wuahandler.log that say I need to check windowsupdate.log for more information, however as we know you can't check windowsupdate.log in the windows directory because it hasn't contained anything for a long time now. (I have included a copy of the message at the end of this post)

PSRemoting is disabled on our network for security. 

My question is, how can I gather the data that powershell would normally collect from the remote machines that makes up windowsupdate.log. 

I could set up a Script in MECM to run from there, something simple like

Get-WindowsUpdateLog -LogPath "\\$LogFileTargetServer\TEMP\WindowsUpdateLogs\Logs\$Hostname-WindowsUpdateLog.log"

I'm just checking before I complicate things that there isn't already an option I'm not aware of like a command line maybe or something similar.  

This same error appears in the logs on various machines

****************************************************************************

This is the message seen in Wuahandler.log, repeated regularly.  

Received 'SucceededWithErrors' code from WUA during search. Check WindowsUpdate.log in Windows directory. WUAHandler 5/08/2020 10:10:50 AM 5728 (0x1660)
WU Agent reported the following 1 warning messages: WUAHandler 5/08/2020 10:10:50 AM 5728 (0x1660)
HResult: 0x8024000e Context: uecWindowsDriver Msg: (null). WUAHandler 5/08/2020 10:10:50 AM 5728 (0x1660)

*********************************************************************************

It reports back with varying error messages in the deployment logs of the console, none of which appear to be very useful - some shown below - I'm hoping WindowsUpdate.log might have more info.  

 - "unspecified error" 0x80004005

- "Success" 0x00000000

- "Unknown Error (-2146994854)" 0x8007755A

- "Unknown Error (-2146994704)" 0x800775F0

[#2 · Accepted solution]

@PaulKlerkx Without being able to use PS Remoting (or something like the SysInternals PSExec tool, I presume), a ConfigMgr console script is probably the easiest solution.

For what it's worth, the 0x8024000e return code translates to WU_E_XML_INVALID: "Windows Update Agent found invalid information in the update's XML data".

[#3]

@Michiel Overweel Awesome, thankyou, not sure why I never thought of the MECM script idea, that should work perfectly.   

Re the error message, I did find that, but the updates install fine on plenty of other computers, just a small percentage with these messages, can't see how the xml would be dodgy for one, but ok for others.  Seems like it is maybe rather a symptom of something else wrong on the devices.  

[#4]

@Michiel Overweel as an aside to this, one of the other guys in my team identified the XML for a lot of the Dell TPU's was using short names (Update~1) instead of full names and this was causing problems for the Dell TPU's, he relayed this to Dell and Dell have confirmed the issue and are in the process of rectifying, so the xml error may be related to that.  

your idea for a script got a bit out of control, so now we have a script that collects the windows update log...and mecm logs, application install logs, system and application event logs, systeminfo, cbs log, dism log,  It documents the software installed and windows updates installed and does a gp result of the logged in user. Puts it all up on a server in a PC name / date-time folder.  Thanks for the idea.