Auto-decline WSUS Itanium Updates

I've been really busy lately. While I haven't had the time to post between work and family (remember to keep balance in your life!), I have a TON of things saved up to post about. Let's hope all of the tech isn't obsolete by the time I get around to it, eh?

In that vein, I'm just going to blast some things out with short posts, in the hope that I'll be able to make the time to actually post.

Also, I'll be putting interesting web pages I come across - mostly news and editorial stuff in the blog roll on the right. It links to my Tumblr page, called The LAG.

So today's post is about WSUS updates. I really like WSUS. I really hate WSUS. I like it because it patches my stuff in an automatic and (not very) complicated way. It hasn't changed all that much in a long time. I hate it because it's TOO simple. I know, if I want granularity I need to plop down the cash for something like System Center. I don't want granularity that badly, though! Case in point, every month I have to go through all of the Patch Tuesday updates and decline the Itanium releases. They waste space on my system, and clutter up my view of approved (and actually useful) updates.

That's why I was SO thrilled when a colleague of mine sent me the link to a Microsoft Technet page that had a powershell script that would decline Itanium updates! I tweaked the script a bit and ran a couple of tests just to make sure it was going to do what I thought (it has a test run component, nice!).

After I verified that it was indeed the magical faerie unicorn that I thought it to be, I scheduled it to run every Tuesday night after WSUS synchronizes.

I'LL NEVER HAVE TO DECLINE ITANIUM UPDATES AGAIN!

You'd think that Microsoft could break these out fairly easily within Products and Classifications, but whatever.