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We have a fleet of roughly 1300 Windows 7 SP1 clients who use a centralized WSUS server to download updates from.

We've implemented the following BITS policy to limit the bandwidth during working hours: GPO

For some reason this does not go into effect at all. Clients are using all the bandwidth they can during work hours.

The clients are spread out to about 40 different locations, all with different subnets. We need to keep the "ignore bandwidth limits" option checked as we deploy new computers from the same subnet as the WSUS servers.

I can verify that the GPO is applied to the client computer, as this is evident both in gpresult and in the local computer policy.

Is this feature deprecated? Can anyone else get this to work?

pauska
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  • Have you tried configuring the Non-Work hours section, just in case it's not honouring the work hours part? – Dan Nov 26 '14 at 11:18
  • @Dan I haven't tried that no, but we really really need to have clients patching after work hours.. – pauska Nov 26 '14 at 11:19
  • 1) Is BITS installed and started on the clients you're trying to rate limit? 2) can you apply the rate-limit to the server instead of the clients? (Seems like that might be easier to manage and troubleshoot... not to mention that 20Kb * 1300 clients is still a good chunk of bandwidth, whereas 20 Kbit is 2.5 Kbyte is approximately equal to nothing, and possibly too low a limit to apply.) And yes, we use this extensively on our bloody T1 inter-site links, and it does work pretty well. Lowest we ever set it was 128 Kbps, though. – HopelessN00b Nov 26 '14 at 13:04
  • @HopelessN00b 1) Yep, verified (and tested through bitsadmin). 2) The server doesn't run BITS, WSUS provides updates through HTTP(S). I'll try to raise it to 128kbit, but that will eat up our poor 4mbit remote offices that has 60 clients. – pauska Nov 26 '14 at 13:31
  • If you want to force client to download after work hours? If yes, you can change download time of updates on clients. – SuB Oct 16 '16 at 21:07

2 Answers2

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Remove the checkmark in the "ignore bandwidth limits..." if your computers are on the same subnet as the WSUS server.

Daniel
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  • They're not on the same subnet, sorry for not including that in the question. It's updated now. – pauska Nov 26 '14 at 12:14
  • I would at least try this anyway. Perhaps for some reason BITS is wrongly assuming that it is in the same subnet. If you test it and it works, at least you would have some more information to go on. – tfrederick74656 Dec 01 '14 at 22:53
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When this policy was showing applied to computers, did the computers restart since or has the BITS service been restarted since the change took effect? I recently applied a BITS policy and was wondering why it didn't work until the BITS service was restarted. I don't know when you applied this so this might not be your issue.

I used the other policy called "Limit the maximum network bandwidth for BITS background transfer" where it is a more simpler schedule not the one you posted because we don't need to be that granular.

Harvey
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