College network - can I point non-domain student computers to our SUS server?
- by Joel Coel
Since I started here 3 months ago, one of the things that's really bothered me about the way this network is setup is something that shows up on the daily bandwidth consumption report. I get a list of top-visited sites by hits and by size, and invariably the top site (to the point that it's bigger than all the other top sites combined) is au.download.windowsupdate.com. We're pulling in ~30GB/day in windows updates. This is every day, not just after a patch Tuesday. After a patch day, it jumps closer to 40GB for a couple days.
The key here is that almost none if it is by machines that I'm responsible for. My machines are for the most part fully patched, and when they're not they'll pull from a SUS server, so new updates are downloaded only once. It used to be closer to 50GB/day because most of the machines in our computer labs use DeepFreeze and weren't applying updates correctly, but that's fixed now.
So the problem is definitely student-owned machines in the dorms, some of which are re-downloading the same updates in background each day, over and over. I'd love to have these machines start pulling from our SUS server. Then, if they don't ever actually install them at least they're not leeching bandwidth from our public internet connection.
Any ideas on how to resolve the situation?
