Micros · production domain

PowerShell fleet automation and WSUS operations

Mass-enabling remote management across a domain — including the machines you cannot reach remotely yet — plus a WSUS patch pipeline on SSL covering roughly 150 machines.

  • Automation
  • PowerShell
  • Windows

01 Problem

Rolling out configuration and remote management across a domain of workstations by hand does not scale, and several tasks hit the classic chicken-and-egg problem where you need remote access to enable remote access.

02 Approach

Wrote PowerShell to mass-enable PSRemoting across an organizational unit, using PsExec, WMIC, and a GPO immediate scheduled task as fallbacks for machines where WinRM was not yet reachable.

Diagnosed a recurring failure where machines booting before the domain controller responded fell back to the Public network profile and silently blocked SMB on 445, and corrected it via network-profile policy.

Set up WSUS on SSL — port 8531, CNAME wsus.micros.uz — and diagnosed update failures including error 0x80244010 and a Windows 10 versus Windows 11 product-category mismatch in the update metadata.

Authored GPOs for wallpaper, RDP, and lock-screen policy.

03 Stack

  • PowerShell
  • PsExec / WMIC
  • Active Directory
  • Group Policy
  • WSUS
  • Windows Server

04 Result

Repeatable fleet configuration across the domain and a working patch pipeline covering roughly 150 machines through WSUS.

05 What broke, and what fixed it

powershell-fleet-wsus/diagnostics 3 entries
  • Silent SMB blocking

    Machines booting ahead of the DC fell back to the Public profile and blocked 445 — fixed via network-profile policy.

  • Bootstrapping remote access

    PsExec, WMIC, and a GPO immediate scheduled task as fallbacks where WinRM was not yet reachable.

  • 0x80244010

    Traced to a Windows 10 versus Windows 11 product-category mismatch in the WSUS update metadata.