Tag Archives: Windows

Update Group Policy Templates

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If you are using Windows 7 clients on your network and wish to manage them fully via group policy you may have noticed that some of the new GP items are missing from your Group Policy Managament Console. This happens when you are running a Domain Controller that is not Windows 2008 R2.

Don’t worry its really easy to copy the newer group policy templates over to your DC, whether it be Windows 2003 or 2008.

Execute the following 2 commands on a Windows 7 workstation:

xcopy %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\* %logonserver%\sysvol\%userdnsdomain%\policies\PolicyDefinitions

xcopy %systemroot%\PolicyDefinitions\EN-US\* %logonserver%\sysvol\%userdnsdomain%\policies\PolicyDefinitions\EN-US\

This will copy all the updated ADMX and ADML files to your DC.

This should take but seconds, now when you access GPMC you will have a full set of Group Policy objects to look at.
 

You may also like to install the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) on your Windows 7 workstation, visit the link below to download:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7D2F6AD7-656B-4313-A005-4E344E43997D&displaylang=en

Adding Printers via Group Policy – Windows 7

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I ran into a rather interesting problem the other day….

Trying to set up a new printer (MFD) on our network we wanted to roll out the drivers via group policy to all clients. As we completely skipped over Vista to Windows 7, I had never come across this problem before.

When I looked into the event log for inspiration I found the following error:

0x80070bcb The specified printer driver was not found on the system and needs to be downloaded.

This problem occured everytime group policy was applied. To fix this problem you could manually install the driver onto the workstation and it would obviously connect the printer. This however is not much of a solution as we want to roll this out to all workstations automactically.

Incidentally, if you try and manually add the printer you get this warning message:

Printer Driver Warning

Printer Driver Warning

The easy solution to this problem is in two group policy settings. This will reduce the security on your system if you set the policy to disable, or you can configure the policy settings to your environment for added security.

Under Windows 7, group policy you need to look at:

Computer Configuration | Policies | Administrative Templates | Printers | Point and Print Restrictions : Disable

User Configuration | Policies | Administrative Templates | Control Panel | Printers | Point and Print Restrictions : Disable

Once applied, Group Policy processing should now compelete succesfully, and your printers should be added.

Making an Xbox 360 connect to a Vista Media Centre PC on SBS 2008

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Well…….

……this has had me ripping my hair out and well i thought what the hell, i’ll post it here. Its not really something you will come across too often unless you have a modern forward thinking office (or high tech home).

The crux of the matter – How on earth do you make an Xbox 360 play nicely with a Vista Media Centre PC that is connected to a domain running Windows Small Business Server 2008?

Well, it is actually quite easy – when you know how.

The first step is to make sure that the Xbox can communicate with the Media Centre PC.

Fire up your Server console and start digging into Active Directory Users and Computers, expand the domain and drill through the organisational units until you get to:

<Domain> – MyBusinss – Computers – SBSComputers

In here you will see the AD account for your computer, drag that account into the SBSServers Unit.

Hey presto job done, your xbox can now see your media centre pc. If you want to speed up the group policy processing so it happens immediately don’t forget to run the following on your media centre pc:

gpupdate /force