Duplicate Server Entries in WSUS Console

Recently I was doing some work to enable Internet Based Client Management (IBCM) within our SCCM environment. In doing so I had to reissue a certificate from our PKI and install add it to the bindings in IIS for the WSUS website. While this is fairly trivial work I noticed after installing the certificate and performing the IIS reset, I now had a duplicate server entry in our WSUS console. The first was the hostname, as we’re used to seeing. The second was the FQDN of the server.

This duplicate entry was benign in all senses. You could interact with both entries. They both worked as expected. Settings were mirrored across both entries. Not a big deal, but an unnecessary point of confusion for anyone else that may need to use the console on the server. Also what I found is that if you deleted the entry, it would come right back if you restarted the console. Also the more you restarted the console, the more duplicate entries that would be populated. This time just multiples of the FQDN entry.

Annoying, right?

Well here’s how you fix it:

1. Close the console
2. Open %appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\MMC
3. Find the file called “wsus”, take a back up of this file, then delete it out of MMC folder.
4. Launch the WSUS console
5. At this point you should see only one entry. Right click your server -> New window from here

The last step (step 5) was really what stopped the duplicates from coming back oddly enough.

Hope this helps! Feel free to leave a comment if this worked for you.

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