Madman_Lorenzo

Working a treat now thanks much.

Hi all, Having taken the helm at a new place, trying to work through a couple of issues that have come up. Opening Group Policy for a look I get the following when expanding Administrative Templates: Resource '$(string.google)' referenced in attribute displayName could not be found. File \\MYDC.MYPLACE.sch.uk\SysVol\MYPLACE.sch.uk\Policies\PolicyDefinitions\chrome.admx, line 14, column 60 Thought I'd look through that chrome.admx and only thing looking untoward was the trailing slash at column 60: So deleted that slash but still didn't solve it, now just get the same error message but with column 59. Anyone seen this? I did think about removing the chrome templates and adding newer ones but seems like there's nothing to uninstall/listed from right-clicking Administrative Templates inside a policy and looking for chrome templates to remove. Thanks for any help. Foxed me here.

This was something to do with the UNC path not being immediately available. Again just when logging right back in after a logout or a restart; leave the thing a whole minute after either and all fine. Solved/Bodged it by steering to \\serverhostname\netlogon\stuff where it was (and ideally would be) \\domainname\netlogon\stuff. Meh. That'll do pig.

Very odd one going on, thought I'd field it to the community. Re-working Group Policy here and hit a strange old snag. Desktops for students redirected to a UNC path in netlogon for the sake of some shortcuts (in addition to the local desktop shortcuts.) All works fine when students log in and out BUT when the same student logs out then immediately logs back in (restart or not) I get a failure to locate the UNC path to the redirected desktop warning box and a blank desktop. Giving it 30 seconds and a few presses of F5 though and it comes back. Has anyone else encountered this oddness out there? If so what does it want clearing locally to hush it up? Thanks for any and all suggestions.

Hi all, Tweaking a few bits at a new place that very much needs some tweaking and hit a snag. Must have come across the same thing (and conquered it previously) but don't recall and not having a major amount of immediate luck with it. Trying to save in eg Excel (Office 2019) and opening the Browse option brings up the following: Now I do believe this is related to restricting access to local drives (C: especially) in Group Policy, which I have done. I'd quite like students to not get to rummage around on C: (nor other local drives) but also quite like them to save things without getting horrifying error messages. Clicking OK on it does indeed make it go away and they can indeed save, but has anyone tackled this recently enough to tell me what it might want? Thanks anyone for any help with this one.

First of all you're all great, thanks much for coming to my aid here. #show mac address-table got me at least the MAC addresses in the end, from there I can determine the IPs if I need. Very grateful.

Evening all. Undergoing some changes in the setup here and our current CCTV system uses an old switch-to-switch VLAN, with no records of the cameras installed. Is there any command anyone knows of that a switch could run that'd return all the IP addresses (also MAC addresses would be nice) of all devices on a particular VLAN? Something in LLDP I'm thinking? Bit out of my depth on that one but if anyone does know that'd be splendid. Thanks all.

Afternoon everyone. Looking at obtaining more Chromebooks earlier on and surprised at how little I know on the alternatives in MS Surface devices. Had been having a Google around and, well, not even sure where I'd go to start (should I ever want to.) Do you need Intune to enrol or manage them? Is it SEMM you need? What needs locking down for students in a broad sense and what can be left alone? No need for a huge amount of detail but if anyone has a little overview or could direct me to some decent reading that'd be fab - most things I've found this afternoon are ads telling me how amazing Surface books are but no basic guides for what as a manager you'd need in place and what to do. Thanks for any pointers.

http://hiremediagroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Why-dog.jpg

You folks have all been wonderful thanks much for the help. Got in this morning to all clients and servers HAPPILY on BST, time perfect across the domain to the second. Delighted, cheers lots.

Thanks for that. I'll admit I checked it out and it confused me slightly more than before. Ok the principle I'm taking away from this is that if and so long as the PDC has the correct time if no other setting at all is set in Group Policy then all clients should eventually get the correct time. From the clock on the PDC. Hopefully that part is at least correct. I haven't worked to this principle currently but at least if this one fundamental thing is right then I can start somewhere. Second thing I'm trying to do is set my Smoothie box as NTP server, with the IP of the local LAN interface being the IP I should imagine we'd set as the NTP server address in any policies we'd be writing. With that in mind I'd assume the following would be ok, but which currently doesn't seem to work: WMI Filter on this one to apply to PDC only: (blanked out internal NIC IP of Smoothie) "Enable Windows NTP Client policy" set to "enabled" and "Enable Windows NTP Server" also enabled. WMI filter on this one to apply to non-PDCs only: "Enable Windows NTP Client policy" set to "enabled" and "Enable Windows NTP Server" also enabled here too. Time now 2 mins out on the PDC vs clients, running gpupdate /force on clients doesn't bring time into line, w32tm /resync /rediscover on clients gives an error "The computer did not resync because no time data was available" and I'm starting to get a little lost now. Thanks any/everyone for sticking with me on this.

Ok, having read around this does look to be a little more complex than I thought, but I may just have a grasp on it. Please put me right if not though! So, in principle, I think you just need to let the AD defaults do the work rather than try and batter the domain and all servers/workstations into submission. AD wants to get members to look to the PDC to be NTP server. Group Policy (weapon of choice to deploy these settings) will need one policy for the PDC and another policy for everything that's not the PDC. PDC of course gets setting to look to and sync with NTP servers out there in the world, everything else looks to the PDC. Setting the WMI filter as follows means you'll be applying the policy to the single PDC which will be Big Ben for the network: SELECT * FROM Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE DomainRole = 5 And for all the rest of the domain members, we'll need a second WMI filter to NOT catch the PDC but catch everything else, and this'll be: SELECT * FROM Win32_ComputerSystem WHERE DomainRole <> 5 Of course, if your AD is structured in such a way that you wouldn't have clients and non-PDC servers hitting each other then you'd technically not need those I guess. I should IMAGINE from then on I set the NTP server to be the LAN NIC of my Smoothwall box. The rest of the settings I think I can work out, primarily nicked the info from the two following pages: https://kimconnect.com/set-ntp-on-primary-domain-controller/ https://kimconnect.com/gpo-to-set-ntp-on-domain-joined-computers-and-servers/ Sounding sane-er? Thanks again everyone.

Thanks much everyone. Ok I think I'm getting there on the principles of it, but I'm still lost as to what we're doing here. Un-picking things here we have inherited, and it looks like a LOT of options have been "explored" in the past. Firstly, just to try and get an easy* option, can I set a top-level policy to just have all clients look to the Smoothwall box to be NTP server? If anyone's done that, are the settings any different to the below? Having of course configured the options in Smoothie to be NTP server, and make it available on the LAN, which I *think* I've done right here: I think this should work, however I'm worried (or rather I just don't know) if then any current DCs will just "take" this setting and not be trying to argue with each other/with the Smoothwall box over who is rightful NTP server and send everything bonkers. (Also did specifically check none of the DCs, all being VMs, are getting any time settings form the hosts they've all got that option un-ticked.) Thanks everyone helping me through this!

Hello everyone, Have a strange issue here which has worked at another school perfectly. Just doesn't seem to work out here and trying to figure out why. These are the only settings applied in the policy: Didn't seem to horrid a prospect for workstations to check in with that pool every hour. But nothing is and times are still wacky. RSOP shows workstations "get" it, they just don't "pay attention" kinda! The only clue I have is if I look to a workstation that should get this setting, I see the Time server (in Date and Time) as one of our local DCs. I would HOPE though that this DC would "take" the policy (it is applied at the very top level.) Not sure where else to check for mischief and non-compliance, anyone have any hints or good ideas on where to start looking? Thanks much everybody.