This is a more technical note than usual because I happened to have a Windows 2012 server that was refusing to see any Microsoft updates. And as someone who goes around telling people to patch their servers, it is somewhat embarrassing to have a server that isn’t patched.
The obvious “fix” is to tell the server to use the proxy cache to request updates from. The current proxy settings can be viewed from the command-line with :-
netsh winhttp show proxy
And to set the proxy settings, simply :-
netsh winhttp set proxy wwwcache.port.ac.uk:81
(Of course if you are not on our network you will have to specify a more appropriate proxy server).
And yes, as soon as the proxy server was specified, Windows started updating healthily again.
And whilst you are about it, you may want to check the “check for updates” dialog to see if it says :-
If it says something more like “For Windows only”, then you won’t be installing all of the necessary updates.