SCCM - Troubleshooting - Windows Updates 0x80070BC9

When pushing out updates to your client machines via SCCM you may encounter one or more of the below issues. From having done a whole bunch of Googling around the various error codes and issues which manifested themselves i think it's fair to say that there a whole host of different things that can break Windows Updates in SCCM. The following is by no means a definitive fix but it helped us out so figured it was worth posting:

Symptoms:

A: In the windowsupdate.log file you may encounter an error with code 80070bc9

B: In the WUAHandler.log file you may receive a message saying that

 

C: In SCCM, when you switch to the Software Updates and view the month’s current updates, SCCM lists all the machine status’ as “Unknown”

Issue:

In this case, an old Group Policy which pointed all clients to a separate WSUS server was still, apparently, haunting the client machines (as shown by the 'overwritten' line in the WUAHandler log). As such the client machines weren’t sure where to look for updates and also weren’t reporting their update status to sccm correctly.

Fix:
Create a group policy which explicitly defines the location that the clients should use for Windows Update (i.e. the sccm server):

 

In theory, this shouldn’t be necessary since the CCM client should define the location of the windows update server but if, for whatever reason, this gets screwed up then manually defining the location via GPO is a good way to get the clients back on the right track.

 

Once you've applied this new GPO to your clients machines, choose a machine and run a Software Update Scan Cycle. The WUAHandler.log should look a bit less red now: