Six methods of Win2003 Group Policy to arrange obstacles

If you've ever used Windows 2000, or if you've already completed a system configuration at the beginning of Windows Server 2003, you'll at least have a little bit of understanding of Group Policy that can be used to dramatically simplify the management of your system architecture. Unfortunately, as with all other technologies, we still need to be troubleshooting Group Policy in the event of an accident. Here are six issues you might encounter in Windows Server 2003 Group Policy and how to solve them.

1. Unexpected results for specific users and computer application policies

Suppose you have created a new set of Group Policy objects. However, the settings have not yet been applied to the target object. Such Group Policy issues are more difficult to capture. However, Microsoft has adopted a new Group Policy Management Console (Policy Management console), which you can download for free. The tool includes a wizard that allows you to quickly view the Group Policy result set (Resultant Set of Policy, RSoP) information associated with the policy. Figure A shows the RSoP information for a specific user on a particular computer.

Figure A: Administrator RSoP on the named RAS server

As you can see, the default Domain policy is rejected by the Windows management architecture (Wmi,windows Management Instrumentation) filter because of WMI errors. This gives an important first step in determining where Group Policy issues are. In this case, the policy is not applied because the WMI filter considers that the policy will only be applied to the user when the user logs on to Windows XP Professional. This particular user is now logged on to a Windows Server 2003 computer, resulting in a filtering failure. Figure B shows the invalidation of the GPO application raised by the WMI filter on Windows Server 2003.

Figure B:WMI Filter indicates Windows XP Pro

As an option, you can use the Gpresult.exe Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit command-line tool to view the details of the RSoP operation. Because the GPMC feature is so powerful and easy to use, I will not discuss gpresult.exe in this article.

Zebian: Bean Technology Application