Browse by Tags

Welcome back! Kim Nichols here once again with the much anticipated Part 2 to Circle Back to Loopback . Thanks for all the comments and feedback on Part 1. For those of you joining us a little late in the game, you'll want to check out Part 1: Circle Back to Loopback before reading further. In my...

Hello again! Kim Nichols here again. For this post, I'm taking a break from the AD LDS discussions (hold your applause until the end) and going back to a topic near and dear to my heart - Group Policy loopback processing. Loopback processing is not a new concept to Group Policy, but it still causes...

Mike here with an important service announcement.  In June of 2010, guest poster Kapil Mehra introduced the Group Policy Search service .  The Group Policy Search (GPS) service is a web application hosted on Windows Azure, which enables you to search for registry-based Group Policy settings...

Heya folks, Ned here again. Rather than continue the lie that this series comes out every Friday like it once did, I am taking the corporate approach and rebranding the mail sack. Maybe we’ll have the occasional Collector’s Edition versions. This week month, I answer your questions on: The semi-myth...

Hi all, Ned here again. We get emailed here all the time about issues involving delays in user logons. Often enough that, a few years back, Bob wrote a multi-part article on the subject. Taking it to the next level, some of my esteemed colleagues have created a multi-part TechNet Wiki series on understanding...

Hi all, Ned here again. I have worked many slow boot and slow logon cases over my career. The Directory Services support team here at Microsoft owns a sizable portion of those operations - user credentials, user profiles, logon and startup scripts, and of course, group policy processing. If I had to...

Hello all, Ned here again with our first mail sack in a couple months. I have enough content built up here that I actually created multiple posts, which means I can personally guarantee there will be another one next week. Unless there isn't! Today we answer your questions around: Detecting...

Hi all, Ned here again. If you've been supporting group policy for years, you’ve grown used to its behaviors. For something designed to manage an enterprise, its initial implementation wasn’t easy to manage itself. The Group Policy Management Console improved this greatly after Windows Server...

Hi folks, Ned here again. I know this is supposed to be the Friday Mail Sack but things got a little hectic and... ah heck, it doesn't need explaining, you're in IT. This week - with help from the ever-crotchety Jonathan Stephens - we talk about: Multiple WMI Filters LDAP MaxPoolThreads Many...

Hi folks, Ned here again with your questions and comments. This week we talk: AD Garbage Collection behavior Applying Group Policy based on installed roles and features Apple hates .local domains More on auto site coverage from Lurch Fixing the mysteriously bad CPU performance of brand...

Hiya folks, Ned here again with another week’s questions, comments, and oddities. This time we’re talking: GPMC inconsistent permissions error ADMT multiple servers DFSR staging calculation performance USMT and MAX_PATH DFSR port 5722 on members Common AD support topics...

Hello AskDS readers, it's Mike again talking about Group Policy Preference targeting items. I posted an article in June entitled Targeting Group Policy Preferences by Container, not by Group . This post highlighted the common problems many people encounter when targeting preferences items based on a...

Hiya folks, Ned here again. I finally have an editor that allows anchors on all the questions, so I am adding a quasi “table of contents” for these posts that allow easier navigation and linking. I’ll retrofit all the old mail sack articles too… eventually. This week we discuss...

Hi folks, Sean Wright here for my final post. So, you have AGPM installed, but your Domain Admins continue using GPMC to create, delete, and modify Group Policy. You’ve asked nicely, but that hasn’t had much effect. Now you want to make your point, and prevent your Domain Admins from managing Group Policy...

Hello again AskDS readers, Mike here again. This post reflects on Group Policy Preference targeting items, specifically targeting by security groups. Targeting preference items by security groups is a bad idea. There is a better way that most environments can accomplish the same result, at a fraction...

Sean again, here for Part 4 of the Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) blog series, following the lifecycle of a Group Policy Object (GPO) as it transitions through various events. In this installment, we investigate what takes place when you use the Import and Export features within AGPM. With...

Sean again, here for Part 3 of the Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) blog series, following the lifecycle of a Group Policy Object (GPO) as it transitions through various AGPM-related events. In this installment, we investigate what takes place when you check-in a controlled GPO. Before editing...

Hey all, Ned here again. Jeff Sigman let me know that the new pre-beta version of Security Compliance Manager became available last month. It adds the number one feature request you’ve all been demanding: GPO Import . Grab it here: http://blogs.technet.com/b/secguide/archive/2011/03/10/scm-v2-ctp-available...

Hi folks, Ned here again. Around six years ago we released Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2003. Like Windows XP SP2, it was a security-focused update. It was the first major server update since the Trustworthy Computing initiative began so there were things like a bootstrapping firewall, Data Execution...

Sean again, here for Part 2 of the Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM) blog series, following the lifecycle of a Group Policy Object (GPO) as it transitions through various events. In this installment, we investigate what takes place when you check-out a controlled GPO. Before editing an AGPM...

Ned here again folks. We introduced granular auditing in Windows Vista and a few years later we released Advanced Audit Policy Configuration . Legacy Windows audit policy didn’t go away, of course. To make things interesting, all of this can be configured through domain policy, local policy, multiple...

Hello all, Ned here again. Today we talk DCDIAG, DFSN, DFSR, group policy, user profiles, migrations, USMT, and the fuuuuuuturrrrrrrrre. DCDIAG failing RPCSS test Disabling DFS targets via command-line RSOP.MSC errors on Win7 The future of AD MIGAPP.XML compatibility between USMT 3...

Hello, Sean here. I’m a Directory Services engineer with Enterprise Platforms Support in Charlotte. Today, I’d like to talk about the inner workings of Advanced Group Policy Management (AGPM). Let’s begin by discovering what occurs behind the scenes when you take control of a Production...

Hello there folks, it's Ned . I’ve been out of pocket for a few weeks and I am moving to a new role here, plus Scott and Jonathan are busy as #$%#^& too, so that all adds up to the blog suffering a bit and the mail sack being pushed a few times. Never fear, we’re back with some goodness...

Hello, Kapil here. I am a Product Quality PM for Windows here in Texas [i.e. someone who falls asleep cuddling his copy of Excel - Ned] . Finding a group policy when starting at the "is there even a setting?" ground zero can be tricky, especially in operating systems older than Vista that do not include...