Getting external help; Win AD/GPO

[steele_uk]

I have been having real problems this last year. Gpo policies not enforcing and sometimes even reverting to the old setting. Replication does not seem to be consistent. Romaing profiles are causing issues and the backup transfer speed has got so slow, we are well into the next day before the job ends.

I still have all my usual jobs to do, and get very little time to spend fixing these things, which have a knokk-on effect of adding to my never-ending list of jobs.

I could do with contracting someone in with specific tasks to perform. ie; please get group policy stable and cosistent.

Has anyone found a reliable contractor that doesn't cost the earth,vast experience that enjoys these sorts of challenges? I would prefer to pay for the fix, than the day rate, although i imagine that is going to be difficult.

I have gone past the point of thinking i can solve this myself, i have devoted many hours into thrying fixes, and most of that time was interupted by students needing password changes, classes needing new toners, or staff wanting youtube clips downloaded... I hate schools at the moment!

We are a 7 server site, 2 X Server 2003 DC's and a seperate Exchange 2007 box, on the last year of a 5 year build. (we will rebuild this summer, but its not soon enough )

Cheers

[Shielder]

Sounds very like the problems we've recently been having - I've at least managed to sort out our GPO issues now although our replication setup is improving (DNS is still a pain though).

Not sure if you're still open to suggestions but the following Microsoft KB article may (or may not) fix the problem with Group Policies not applying - found out that our Computer Policies weren't applying on startup, and without those, the User Policies wouldn't apply either so it was reverting to cached policies (as in your case).

The article is here: Group Policy application fails on a computer that is running Windows 2000, Windows XP Service Pack 1, or Windows XP Service Pack 2

What this registry fix does is extend the amount of time Windows waits at startup for the Network card to kick in before processing Group Policy since as you may have guessed, our PCs were processing Group Policy before the PC's onboard LAN had initialised, therefore assuming that the previous cached Group Policies were the ones that were the most current and the ones to use.

Previous to this, we were getting up to 20-25 students a day coming in to tell us that they couldn't access the internet - I changed out our Smoothwall Express box with another with a different IP - however, since I've been rolling out this fix, I rarely see 1-5 student with internet problems.

I'm not saying this will fix your GPO problems (still believe there is a good chance though) but if it did, it may also help to relieve some of the other problems you're having.

Something to mull over anyway.

[p858snake]

To speed up the rebuild have you thought about making a virtual server set-up then cloning that onto the real server during some downtime (eg: afternoon/weekend)?

[IanT]

I have been having real problems this last year. Gpo policies not enforcing and sometimes even reverting to the old setting. Replication does not seem to be consistent. Romaing profiles are causing issues and the backup transfer speed has got so slow, we are well into the next day before the job ends.

I still have all my usual jobs to do, and get very little time to spend fixing these things, which have a knokk-on effect of adding to my never-ending list of jobs.

I could do with contracting someone in with specific tasks to perform. ie; please get group policy stable and cosistent.

Has anyone found a reliable contractor that doesn't cost the earth,vast experience that enjoys these sorts of challenges? I would prefer to pay for the fix, than the day rate, although i imagine that is going to be difficult.

I have gone past the point of thinking i can solve this myself, i have devoted many hours into thrying fixes, and most of that time was interupted by students needing password changes, classes needing new toners, or staff wanting youtube clips downloaded... I hate schools at the moment!

We are a 7 server site, 2 X Server 2003 DC's and a seperate Exchange 2007 box, on the last year of a 5 year build. (we will rebuild this summer, but its not soon enough )

Cheers

If u want external help, call these guys "Lanmark Technical Services" Lanmark : IT Support, Technical Services, Consultancy, Security, Monitoring, Remote, Hosting and Software.

[mikedoubleu]

Hi steele_uk,

Where abouts are you based in the UK?

Mike