On my WSUS implementations on my Windows 2008 servers I’ve an issue on two occasions where clients become unable to download the wuident.cab file.  Attempting to manually download the file results in a “403-Forbidden: Access is denied” error.  The first time I was getting the error I had an update to the Windows Update Service that I had been putting off, and after installing it the error cleared up.  The second time it came up only one of my update servers had the issue and I was befuddled as (just like the first time) the server was working fine and then began getting the issue seemingly out of the blue (more than likely due to an update of some sort?  The DPM install on the same server?).  One caveat though was that it all worked fine locally.

After hunting through the GUI and checking permissions I finally tracked down this web link.  For some reason the ‘<location path=”Default Web Site/SimpleAuthWebService”>’ section of the applicationhost.config file was getting set to all the ‘NoRemote’ settings.  After setting the handler section to “<handlers accessPolicy=”Read, Script” />” the WSUS began functioning properly again.

I’m not a total gluten for the GUI, but it would be nice to know where it’s purview ended and the text based editing began (maybe an embedded link in the GUI?).  It could also be that I’m not quite familiar enough with it as well since I’m constantly having to switch between the 6 and 7 interfaces.