Vista updates via proxy - how?

[spudulike]

Our youth cybercafé runs three or four sessions each week. We have a nice fast connection with Nildram, even in the evenings as we're on a rural exchange with no LLU.

However, now we have six new PCs running Vista (replacing five WIndows ME) I've noticed that our data usage has more than doubled. Now, we get charged a bit extra which isn't an issue but I don't really want six lots of updates clogging up our bandwidth for the first 20 or 30 minutes of a session.

I have a Mepis Linux PC on 10.0.0.3 running dansguardian listening on port 8080, squid listening on 3128 and dnsmasq. All the PCs have their web browser's connections proxying to 10.0.0.3:8080.

So.... how do I cache Windows updates? Apparently on XP I would have used proxycfg. On Vista as admin user I tried netsh, then winhttp set proxy 10.0.0.3:3128 but I got "error (5), access denied". I tried this on an Acer PC (Vista Premium) and HP laptop (Vista Business). What am I doing wrong?

 

[cybershot]

Sounds daft but have you done the right click and run as administrator, even for going into the command prompt

 

[spudulike]

I was logged on as the administrator but when I opened a command prompt I didn't do a "run as admin", so I'll try that (next Thursday when I'm down there).

 

[jæd]

Our youth cybercafé runs three or four sessions each week. We have a nice fast connection with Nildram, even in the evenings as we're on a rural exchange with no LLU.

However, now we have six new PCs running Vista (replacing five WIndows ME) I've noticed that our data usage has more than doubled. Now, we get charged a bit extra which isn't an issue but I don't really want six lots of updates clogging up our bandwidth for the first 20 or 30 minutes of a session.

I have a Mepis Linux PC on 10.0.0.3 running dansguardian listening on port 8080, squid listening on 3128 and dnsmasq. All the PCs have their web browser's connections proxying to 10.0.0.3:8080.

So.... how do I cache Windows updates? Apparently on XP I would have used proxycfg. On Vista as admin user I tried netsh, then winhttp set proxy 10.0.0.3:3128 but I got "error (5), access denied". I tried this on an Acer PC (Vista Premium) and HP laptop (Vista Business). What am I doing wrong?

What happens if you use the squid proxy while browsing...? Ie, switch the web proxy to 3128 as well... Sounds like you might not have given your network access to the proxy...

 

[spudulike]

What happens if you use the squid proxy while browsing...? Ie, switch the web proxy to 3128 as well... Sounds like you might not have given your network access to the proxy...

I'll double check that, but I'm pretty sure I did that at some stage (guest account web proxied to 8080, so when logged in as admin I set up IE to 3128 so I could try the "winhttp import proxy source=ie").

I know I tried 8080 and got the same error 5.

e2a: There's probably a simpler way of doing this, like telling one vista PC to save it's updates, give that a fixed IP or a shared folder, and tell other Vista PCs to look only there for updates.

 

[jæd]

I'll double check that, but I'm pretty sure I did that at some stage (guest account web proxied to 8080, so when logged in as admin I set up IE to 3128 so I could try the "winhttp import proxy source=ie").

I know I tried 8080 and got the same error 5.

e2a: There's probably a simpler way of doing this, like telling one vista PC to save it's updates, give that a fixed IP or a shared folder, and tell other Vista PCs to look only there for updates.

One alternative would be http://www.autopatcher.com/ .. .

 

[spudulike]

One alternative would be http://www.autopatcher.com/ .. .

Cheers, I've got that coming down on P2P and will give it a try.