josno

Most of the comments in this thread seem to be pretty pessimistic - is there no-one out there who enjoys there job?! I was really lucky and got a job as an ICT Technician in a secondary/6th form school in my gap year between A levels and Uni and I absolutely loved it. Even luckier, it was the year they were moving from Win98/NT4 to XP/Server 2k3 and was heavily involved in creating group policy, setting up remote XP installs etc. What I loved was the variety in the job and the rich IT environment a school provided. Even though I'm now doing a degree in French I'm hoping to go back to technicianing after I graduate - are people saying this isn't something they'd advise?

That's pretty much exactly the same script as I wrote (except I couldn't get the script to read the files from my file server, so I actually put them in the policies folder). Unfortunately it doesn't work. At least I don't think it does - I'll have another go now.

I have had a look at that. They only help if I could figure a way of running the update successfully on a machine from a remote location though.

Ok, this really shouldn't be hard. I have a hotfix. It is an .exe. How do I deploy it to my 500 odd machines automatically? I can't deploy it through SMS because it's neither an MSI nor a proper Windows Update (and I haven't got the inventory enabled anyway, and can't be bothered to find out how unless someone has a nice easy step-by-step guide), nor can I seem to install it by running it at startup. What do I have to do?!?!?!

Thanks very much for the link to the hotfix Geoff - I phoned up Microsoft this morning and received the fix which seemed to work. Now I just have to figure out a way of deploying it to a few hundred machines...

The 'ghost' group policy settings is exactly the situation we're in. However, I found that if you create the default/mandatory profile from a local user rather than a domain user, there are no 'ghost' GPOs. However, I haven't experienced your first comment - as far as I can see, all policy is being applied correctly except the IE branding. Thanks for the link Geoff - that looks like the thing I've been after. Pity I have to phone up MS to get the hotfix I'll have a look at it tomorrow. Have a good evening! Joe

Yes... Why?

Ah, I didn't know that. It is sitting right next to me though, so it doesn't make much difference! Ok, well it's not working. Not entirely sure whether it was in the first place - maybe it was all just a figment of my imagination... Anyway, so downloading the mandatory/default profile (they're both pretty much the same) now results in me not being able to get on the internet at all. I think it's only the IE branding that's not working because all the other policies seem to be unaffected. If I just pick up the local default profile, then it works fine.

I think I've actually found the solution - when I created the mandatory and default profiles I was logged on to a machine with a Domain User, so group policy was being applied. I just created a profile with a local user (so no group policy was being applied) and uploaded that, and it seemed to work. I'll test it more thoroughly, but I think that's fixed it - I'll just stick with my mandatory profiles. Oh, and I was using GPMC to actually create and manage group policy, but gpresult on a machine that's having problems is incredibly useful, to see what policies are actually being applied. Thanks for talking it through with me! Joe

It doesn't for the computer policies (unless you restart the computer) but the user policies it certainly does - as I said, the gpresult I did showed that the new policy came into effect. So by your theory, if I don't delete the user's profile, the new GPOs will be applied when they next log in? Mandatory profiles unfortunately have the same problem, which is why I want to move to roaming.

I should have stated that Fast Boot is off, so group policy is refreshed every time the user logs on - it shows up in a gpresult which is the most bizarre thing. And step 5 doesn't happen because I deleted the local profile in between the user logging out and in again so they would download the default profile again.

Hi, We're just setting up a Win2k3 domain and are having a bit of trouble with profiles. We started off using Mandatory profiles for the kids, but then found out that it was overriding any new GPOs that were set, so we've decided to go roaming, locking down with group policy. However, I also found out that if I create a Default User profile in the NETLOGON folder, that too overrides GPOs (well, at least the proxy settings GPO that I've been testing it with). Log on to a machine with a test student user that downloads the default profile, and they have filtered proxy settings - fine. Log off, delete their profile, change the GPOs so that unfiltered proxy settings are attached to their OU and remove the filtered ones, log on, download the default profile and the filtered settings still apply. Anyone have any ideas?! Joe

Well for some reason it seems to be doing exactly as you said now. Viewing the properties shows you quota information as if it were just any other drive. Don't know what I was doing wrong in the first place. Thanks for your reply! Joe

Really? I thought I'd done that, and it reported the free space of the entire volume (not really that helpful). I'll give it another go tomorrow though...

Hi, We've just started using Windows Server 2003 quotas for students home directories. They work fine, apart from the fact that the students can't see disk usage/free space/total space. Is there a (preferably free) 3rd party utility to report this? It doesn't have to be fancy particularly. I found a free java-based disk usage tool (I think from a recommendation here) which is good for seeing what files are taking up the most space, but it still doesn't say how much space is left. I even tried resorting to using VBS to report the quota information, but the kids don't have permissions to return quota info from the server. Any suggestions? Thanks, Joe