Share via

Changes to FCS Client WSUS Installation package

  • Article

Using WSUS is likely the easiest and most popular way to deploy the FCS client to computers. As described in the deployment guide, after deploying FCS policy and approving the package Client Update for Microsoft Forefront Client Security (1.0.1703.0) on your WSUS 2.0 or 3.0 server, the FCS client is downloaded and installed on the machine according to your company’s Windows Update policy.

The FCS package has the ability to detect the language of the machine contacting the WSUS server and install the same FCS language; for example if you have a French Vista machine you will receive French FCS, or a Japanese Windows Server 2003 server you will receive Japanese FCS. This works great for the languages that FCS was localized to, but what about the other Windows languages?

The FCS team received great feedback from its customers using non-FCS localized Windows languages who also wanted to take advantage of the easy deployment through WSUS. In response to that feedback, the FCS team has made changes to the FCS client WSUS installation package to support installing English FCS on those machines running a non-FCS localized Windows language (for example Swedish, Russian, or Finnish). The exceptions to this are Arabic and Hebrew; the package will not be offered to those because of known issues with the FCS client on those bi-directional languages.

Support for WSUS FCS client deployment for these additional languages should be a great benefit for customers in many parts of the world. Additional technical documentation on the update will be provided in future TechNet documentation or a knowledge base article, and will include:

· WSUS deployment still requires that FCS policy is already deployed

· For non-FCS localized Windows languages, the new installation package does not automatically install the required KB914882 update on x86 Windows XP SP2. Therefore, prior to WSUS deployment you must deploy the correct OS language version of update (found in the \client directory of the FCS CD media) to XP machines. No additional work is required for other operating systems.

 

Re-approval Required

The original client installation package was changed to include detection for these additional languages. During this process, a new update package was released and the old package was expired. For this reason, you may notice on your WSUS server that the previous update package is either no longer shown or shows as expired (depending on your view). You may also see the current package is shown as “Not Approved”. This is because the Forefront Client Security distribution server role creates an auto-approval rule for the Definition Updates WSUS classification; however the client installation package has a classification of Updates. Therefore, when the new package is downloaded it will not be automatically approved unless your WSUS administrator has created an auto-approval rule for Updates as well. This should not affect FCS definition updates and can be easily returned to its previous state by manually approving the new package Client Update for Microsoft Forefront Client Security (1.0.1703.0) on your WSUS 2.0 or 3.0 server (dated Wednesday, October 03, 2007).

Best of luck and happy deployments.

 

Craig Wiand
Microsoft Forefront Client Security Support

Comments