Group Policy has been with us for well over 12 years now and has turned out to be a good tool for deploying configurations to your users, servers and clients. A summary of Group Policy in general is beyond what I want to say here so for anyone looking for that before reading on have …
Category Archives: Group Policy
Viewing the contents of Group Policy Registry.pol files
While investigating some EFS settings I needed to look at the raw data in Group Policy settings files, usually called Registry.pol and located in the SYSVOL share for each GPO. First I tried to load it as any other hive in Registry Editor, but that did not work, indicating that .pol files do not use …
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Group Policy WMI filters
WMI filters are useful to further filter Group Policy Objects (GPOs), beyond what is possible/convenient with groups. Distinguish between x86 and x64 computers: x86 Select AddressWidth from Win32_Processor where (AddressWidth=”32″) x64 Select AddressWidth from Win32_Processor where (AddressWidth=”64″) Determine Windows version: Use this filter to determine the Windows version and role: select * from Win32_OperatingSystem where …
Microsoft Security Essentials, Sysprep and Group Policy
In smaller deployments Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE) is a good, free alternative for anti-malware. If you decide to use MSE in your images, you will discover that sysprep resets the Out Of Box Experience (OOBE) settings for MSE. In other words; every user that logs on to a machine deployed from your image will see …
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Availability of the Group Policy Hide drives calculator and associated template
A long time ago I created an HTML based application to calculate the numeric values required to hide specific combinations of drive letters through Group Policy. I also made a custom template file where you could enter the numeric value directly instead of editing the templates that came with Windows. I used to host these …
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Working with Group Policy Restricted Groups policies
What are Restricted Groups? The Restricted Groups security setting in Group Policy allows an administrator to define two properties for security-sensitive groups (“restricted” groups). The two properties are Members and Member Of. In short it lets an Administrator decide which security principals are members of a restricted group, and which groups the restricted group is …
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