SCCM: WSUS re-installation

I recently found a badly broken 2012 R2 WSUS in one of my Clients environment. After some troubleshooting I decided to re-install WSUS to save time.

Here are several points to remember during re-installation.

1. Not everything will be uninstall with WSUS

– Windows Internal Database (should be unchecked in Feature List during uninstallation or uninstalled using directions: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd939818(v=ws.10).aspx)

– Content of C:\Windows|WID should be cleared before the new install (otherwise you may have an error message “Synchronization in progress. Please cancel synchronization and rerun postinstall again.”  after the new WSUS will be installed

– you may decide to clean \WSUS folder created for the old WSUS

2. If you will use PowerShell for WSUS installation and wsusutill won’t be able to configure WSUSContent folder for you you may have an error saying Content folder cannot be accessed. In this case you may decide to add the content folder location to XML configuration script, the process is described here: https://gyorgybalassy.wordpress.com/2013/08/10/installing-wsus-on-windows-server-2012/

Unfortunately in my case postinstall failed regardless giving me weird: “System.InvalidOperationException — Client found response content type of ‘text/html; charset=utf-8’, but expected ‘text/xml’”. I tried to unistall MMC cache for WSUS, uninstall WID and WSUS, nothing helped.

Finally I uninstalled WSUS, WID, IIS, cleaned abovementioned directories, reboot the server and installed the WSUS back (enabled HTTP Activation under WCF for .Net 4.5 and  patched the server with the latest WSUS Updates). This time it successfully started.