SCUP Connection Error: Fixing a Failed Update Server Connection

SCUP: “Failed to Connect to the Update Server” Error

If you’re setting up System Center Updates Publisher (SCUP) against a WSUS server and get an error along the lines of “Failed to connect to the update server. Request for principal permission failed” when trying to connect or publish, this is almost always a permissions/configuration issue between SCUP and WSUS rather than a network connectivity problem — the connection itself is reaching the server fine, it’s being rejected at the authorisation stage.

Things to check, roughly in order of how often they turn out to be the cause:

• Confirm the account running SCUP has local administrator rights on the WSUS server itself, not just on the SCUP machine.
• If SCUP and WSUS are on separate machines, double-check the WSUS server’s IIS configuration allows the connection — the WSUS API website in IIS needs to be reachable and not blocked by an intermediate firewall.
• Verify the WSUS server name and port configured inside SCUP’s options exactly match how WSUS is actually configured, including the SSL port if WSUS is set up for HTTPS, since a mismatched port is a common cause of exactly this error.
• Restart the WSUS service (and IIS) after any changes, then retry the SCUP connection.

Once the connection succeeds, it’s worth doing a small test publish of a single, low-risk update rather than your full catalog, just to confirm the whole SCUP-to-WSUS-to-ConfigMgr chain is working end to end before you rely on it for real.

Resources

• WSUS