Verifying That Clients Are Using GPO Settings with GPResult

You can also verify that clients are using the WSUS server from the command prompt. Launch a command prompt, and execute the following two commands:

Gpresult /v shows the result of applied Group Policies. The /v switch provides the results in verbose mode (lots of words), and > gpr.txt redirects the output to a text file named gpr.txt. You can then open the file in Notepad with Notepad gpr.txt, which can then be easily browsed and searched.

If you created a new policy and named it WSUS, it will be displayed in the Computer Settings section under the Applied Group Policy Objects heading as follows:

Applied Group Policy Objects
-----------------------------
Default Domain Policy
WSUS
Local Group Policy

In addition, the Administrative Templates section will have several settings related to updates but aren't in simple English. The easiest thing to decipher here is the UseWUServer Registry key. It has a value of 1, indicating that a WSUS server is designated.

GPO: WSUS
KeyName: 	Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\AU\UseWUServer
Value: 		1, 0, 0, 0
State: 		Enabled

Not so easy to decipher is that the server is designated as http://DC1 using ASCII characters. Each character is separated with a 0 or an ASCII null character.

GPO: WSUS
KeyName: 	Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\WindowsUpdate\WUServer
Value: 		104, 0, 116, 0, 116, 0, 112, 0, 58, 0, 47, 0, 47, 0,
		100, 0, 99, 0, 49, 0, 0, 0
State: 		Enabled