Innovative Technology Weblog

Last month me and some collegues went to MMS2008 in Las Vegas were I saw a cool demo of Group Police Preferences. The name Group Policy Preferences did ring a bell with me and suddenly I remembered. A few weeks before MMS I saw a Windows Update that was called Group Policy Preferences Client Side Extensions, but I did’nt know what it was.

So now that I’m a few weeks back home I finaly had some time to play with it on my Demo Domain that I setup last week using CoreConfigurator. To use Group Policy Preferences you must have a few things in place:

• A Windows Server 2008 or Windows Vista SP1 machine (only needed for managing Group Policy Preferences)
• RSAT Installed on the management machine
• Deployed the Group Policy Preferences Client Side Extensions to your Desktops/Servers (XP SP2 or higher)
• Active Directory

Note : You don’t need a 2008 DC or Windows Vista SP1 client to use Group Policy Preferences !!

On the left screenshot you can see all the different options that can be managed using Group Policy Preferences. There ar too much settings to show them all on this blog, but I realy like to show you some nice things. I made some screenshots of some common things you normaly do in loginscripts or kix scripts, but that are now possible in Group Policy. (click on the images to see it full size)

With Group Policy Preferences it is easy to map networkdrives. Not only you can map a drive for all users in a generic user policy, but it is also  possible to target this mapping to no more then 27 targeting rules. (Image on the right)

Most common is to map a network share based on group membership or IP subnet. This way way it is possible to map a share witf for example application data to a server that is on the same geographical location as the user without the need of using DFS or site loginscripts.

An other example is setting up how users (or administrators) see their files in Windows Explorer. In this screenshot I set it up so that the user will see the file extentions for known files and also shows hidden & system files, this is a setting that most admins will set if they logon to a new machine. This is also the power of Group Policy Preferences, the most settings an administrator will have to manualy do if he is building a new image for deployment can be managed by Group Policy Preferences.

As you can imagine there are hundreds or maybe thousends of possibilities that you use in solving those anoying problems you usely have to solve using scripts or other tools.

Next thing I have to do is migrating my loginscript at home to Group Policy Preferences.

Have fun with it.

Erik Luppes

2 Years after we’ve put Buit.org online, it was needed that we do a complete makeover.
In the 2 years we have upgraded Buit.org to the most current version of WordPress, but never updated our look and feel of the site.

Now that WordPress has a complete new engine using AJAX and other Web 2.0 technology it was needed that we upgraded the ‘skin’ of Buit.org so we can use those new technologies. One of the biggest improvements for me as the site admin is that we now finaly kan use capcha in the comments forms. This is used for unregistred users that want to leave comments. If they want to leave a comment they have to read an image that is hard (but not impossible) to read by a spambot.

It looks that this works well, cause yesterday we had 120 spam comments within the hour and after enabling captcha (18 hours ago) we did’nt receive a single spam message

An other great thing is that we have better stats so we can track our favorite articles and anticipate on this by writing more articles on the subjects you like.

Please leave your toughts on this new look in our comments and if you are reading this in a RSS reader, please click visit our site to see what we have accomplished.

Grtz,

Erik

A few months ago I’ve wrote a post about Exchange SP1 for the lazy Admin. Now I found something on the web for the same admins but that is usefull in setting up Windows Server 2008 Core.

As you should know by now in Server Core there is no GUI (well there are exeptions like notepad and time settings) so Administrators have to know the CLI commands to setup their servers. The last 2 years I have worked on my Linux skills and can say that finaly I can remember the commands that I use on a daily/weekly basis. But how many times a day or week do you setup a new Domain Controller ? I say not offtenly enough to remember the commands without mistakes.

Last week I was looking on the web for the commandlines to setup a DC but found a tool that was called “CoreConfigurator”

As you can see you can do the basic tasks that you normaly would do if you setup a new server, but still using a GUI. For example if you want to setup the Windows Firewall (only the basic stuff) you normaly have to use the netsh command and that command alone has hundreds of options that you have to know.

Using this tool I was able to setup my Demo domain within 5 minutes with only one CLI Command : C:\Program Files\CoreConfigurator\CoreConfigurator.exe

So the rest of the evening I have spend on drinking beer and eating some chips while watching the 5th season of 24 (the terrorists have stolen some Sentox-nervegas, but I think that Jack Bauer will save the day within 24 hours )

To download CoreConfigurator Click Here

On MMS Day 1 the keynote was opened by Bob Muglia (VP Server & Tools Business)

This keynote was all about Dynamic IT, the 10 year vision of Microsoft in how to operate dynamic datacenters. Currently Microsoft is in year 5 of this vision and realy showed some cool stuff in the keynote compared to how we managed our environments 5 years ago. I realy like the vision Microsoft is having on a Dynamic Datacenter using virtualisation, not only on the OS layer but also on the application layer.

In a Dynamic Datacenter all services are devided in 4 layers:

• Hardware
• Hardware Virtualisation
• Application Virtualisation
• Models

The hardware layer can be managed with System Center Configuration Manager, during the keynote Microsoft did a demo on how Dynamic IT is working for server deployment. Just by using Server 2008 Server Roles en Features, a Configuration Manager Task Sequencer and a special plugin from Dell in this sequencer Microsoft was able to install a domain controller unattende on a Dell server. During this unattende installation it was possible to do the RAID settings, BIOS settings and other hardware based setting needed to roll-out the server to be compliant with the rest of the infrastructure. This way there is no need for an administrator to be present in a datacenter and still you will be able to roll out servers.

On the Hardware Virtualisation Layer, Microsoft did a demo of Virtual Machine Manager 2008 beta that was anounced during the keynote. A cool feature of VMM2008 is that it is able to manage VMware ESX servers, so in the near future it will be possible to manage your Virtual environment from 1 tool. This tool also supports Live migration of VMware machines. Like other Microsoft tooling VMM2008 also gives the output of the tasks you perform as an PowerShell script, so administrators that do not master PowerShell still have the abbility to automate repeating tasks.

Microsoft also announced the beta of SCOM Cross Platform Monitoring, that Walter described in last post.

So if you are interested in the slides of the Keynote on day 1 you can watch the here :

Slidedeck Keynote Day 1

Hi there folks,

Just want to let you know that last friday my Chumby finaly arrived.
After seeing Jeroen’s Chumby I realy needed to have one too.

But the difference between Jeroen & me is that I can be realy freaky.

Like I love to host websites (also this one) so why not turn my Chumby into a webserver.
To do this I had to login with SSH on my Chumby and had to compile the webserver on this little Linux machine. The fun thing about that is you had to enable the SSH Daemon. To enable it I had to go to the about screen of the Chumby, on this screen there is al little PI symbol, what reminded me of a movie with Sandra Bullock “The Net”

After having the Chumby serving webpages I also had to hook it up to the Internet on a safely manner, so I configured my ISA 2006 server to publish my Chumby. I wonder if there are things you buy in the store that you cant publish with an ISA server

If you like to pay my Chumby a visit please go to :

My Chumby

My Chumby is pleased to serve you