Group Policy Preferences Processing Order

Just to clarify something that people should be aware of, the Group Policy Preferences processing order. Within each CSE the settings are applied starting at number one and working down from there. I know it sounds obvious, but the documentation generally say “starting with the highest”, which I think leaves room for confusion as “the highest” could mean it finishes with one, especially when you look in the context of Group Policy and that the last setting applied wins.

Anyway, one and down from there.

HP iLO2 Firmware Upgrade Failing Via Web Page

While I was trying to update an iLO from version 2.00 to 2.27 on a HP DL360 G6, I was seeing the firmware update fail in Windows, the error back was that the hardware installed in the server was incorrect. Installing the firmware through the iLO web page itself just failed, appearing to timeout when attempting to upload the image.

The fix for this, oddly enough was to use Firefox. When doing the same update to the iLO in Firefox, the image does get uploaded and the firmware update then completed without any problems.

svchost.exe troubleshooting

If you’ve ever been in a situation where you have a service falling over with no obvious cause, it might be some other service running under the same svchost process causing the failure. As it turns out the Microsoft Performance Team have a very handy guide on svchost troubleshooting.

This covers how to isolate the suspected service into it’s own process, even going as far as running it with it’s own svchost process, so it’s easier to see if it really is the service you suspect causing the problem, or something else. In my case I was trying to pin down a crash with the lanmanserver service, and this was very useful.

Group Policy – Unattended Sleep Timeout

Update: Thanks to a helpful comment from Alain Roy, the answer is here – Sleep unattended idle timeout

There is a Group Policy setting called “Specify the unattended sleep timeout” located here;

Computer Configuration – Administrative Templates – System – Power Management – Sleep Settings

The description given for the policy is;

This policy setting allows you to specify the period of inactivity before Windows transitions to sleep automatically when a user is not present at the computer.

If you enable this policy setting, you must provide a value, in seconds, indicating how much idle time should elapse before Windows automatically transitions to sleep when left unattended. If you specify 0 seconds, Windows does not automatically transition to sleep.

If you disable or do not configure this policy setting, users control this setting.

If the user has configured a slide show to run on the lock screen when the machine is locked, this can prevent the sleep transition from occurring. The “Prevent enabling lock screen slide show” policy setting can be used to disable the slide show feature.

What I want to know is how on earth the system determines when it’s unattended. What if you’re watching a full screen video, is that unattended? What if you’re just running an Excel calculation, is that unattended?

I can find very little information, none in fact, on the Internet on how this is determined, but if anyone knows, please share.

Adding name servers to multiple DNS zones with PowerShell

I ran into a little problem today where I needed to add multiple DNS servers as name servers to multiple DNS zones all in one go. So this is essentially adding NS resource records to a zone, but doing it for multiple zones all at once. Yes I could have done them manually, but that’s boring and time consuming. So, here’s a quick one-liner that does the trick, obviously substitute in your DNS server and name server FQDNs in the correct places. If it fails for any reason it will continue on, but report the zone it failed on.

Get-DnsServerZone -ComputerName dnsserver.domain.com | where {$_.zonetype -eq "primary" -or $_.zonetype -eq "secondary"} | ForEach-Object {try {Add-DnsServerResourceRecord -ZoneName $_.zonename -ns -ComputerName dnsserver.domain.com -name $_.zonename -NameServer newdnsserver.domain.com -ea:stop} catch {"$_"}}

Hope someone finds that useful.

Cisco AnyConnect “Failed to initialize connection subsystem” Error When Connecting to VPN on Windows 7 or Windows 8

I just today I tried to connect to my work network from home using the Cisco AnyConnect client, for reference I’m using AnyConnect 3.1.05182 on Windows 8.1, and was unable to. I was immediately presented with an error before even being asked for a username and password, which said something was wrong with the client, as it hadn’t really had time to start any proper negotiations with the ASA.

A little bit of Googling revealed that the problem might have come from a recent Microsoft update, dated just a few days ago. I had noticed my machine downloading a few updates of late, and I’m nowhere near as diligent with testing updates on my personal machine as I should be, or as I am on any work related systems.

It turns out that this is indeed a bug with the latest set of Microsoft patches, and Cisco confirmed this here.

While Cisco have said ultimately the fix has to come from Microsoft, there is a workaround until a permanent fix is produced;

  • Close the AnyConnect client from the system tray
  • Navigate to the AnyConnect client install location, for example “C:\Program Files (x86)\Cisco\Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client\”
  • Right click on the vpnui.exe and click troubleshoot compatability
  • Pick “Try recommended settings”
  • Click “Test Program” and this will reopen the AnyConnect client
  • Repeat the same process again, but for vpnagent.exe

    • On the final test when the AnyConnect client opens again, you then find that you’re able to connect normally again. If you have Cisco support it would probably be valuable opening a TAC case and mentioning case number #115021112390273. This bug does also affect Windows 7 when IE11 is installed, and the same fix should work there too.

    Enabling Individual Settings Within A Group Policy Preference

    When you’re creating a set of Group Policy preferences, you can set all kinds of settings in a very similar way to how you would if you were sat in front of the machine. For example, IE settings are very intuitively laid out and it really is just like doing it within the internet control panel screen;

    IE Preferences

    The key thing to remember though, is that in a lot of cases, just setting the preference isn’t enough, you have to enable it too. So for example, entering a homepage into the preferences panel will not make it actually apply, as you can see the lines underneath it stay broken red, which means that the setting will not get applied;

    Setting Not Applied

    Although it’s not mentioned within the policy at all, there are keys you can press to enable or disable individual settings, or the entire page, and these are documented on Technet.

    Basically, to enable the homepage setting we saw above, after you’ve finished entering it, press F6 and this will turn the line under the settings to green and this means that then this will get applied;

    Applied Setting

    So from this you can enable or disable any setting from within the policy, and hopefully take a little more control over your Internet Explorer settings going forwards.

    .NET Framework Cleanup – Full Uninstall

    I came across a server today that had some horrible problem with the .NET frameworks on it, and none of the updates or service packs from Windows update would install. I couldn’t remove any of the .NET applications using either the App/Remove Programs GUI, or via the correct msiexec install strings. I’m not sure how the server came to be like this, but it was a problem I had to sort out and basically I was a little stumped, until I came across Aaron Stebner’s MSDN blog. He had a post about completely removing the .NET applications in their entirety.

    The application works on all versions of .NET and you can find it on his blog here
    Once you’ve run the cleanup tool, reboot and then you can just install the applications from Windows Update again. The application worked very well and once it was finished, all was well in the .NET world.

    Managing Group Policy Templates Using A Central Store

    Previously the common and accepted way to add a policy template into a new group policy was to do it from within the policy itself, that would be done by right clicking on Administrative Templates and then adding it from there, picking the correct template you were wanting to add, as below;

    Add Policy Template

    Though in a domain environment, you really should be looking at doing this centrally by creating a central policy store. Doing this has a few advantages, such as all the policy template files being replicated round all servers either via FRS or DFSR, and only having one place to go to update or add templates, making future management simpler. Microsoft have all the details, but it’s a fairly simple process;

  • Create the root folder for the central store %systemroot%\sysvol\domain\policies\PolicyDefinitions on your domain controller.
  • Create a subfolder of %systemroot%\sysvol\domain\policies\PolicyDefinitions for each language your Group Policy administrators will use.

    • Note: Each subfolder is named after the appropriate ISO-style Language name, for example, to create a subfolder for U.S. English, create the subfolder: %systemroot%\sysvol\domain\policies\PolicyDefinitions\EN-US

    This should make your life a little easier when it comes to managing policy templates.

    Group Policy Preferences For Different Versions Of Internet Explorer In the Same Policy

    So, you’re managing a Windows estate and you’re in the process of updating Internet Explorer versions that you’ve managed via Group Policy. At some point you’re going to have multiple versions of Internet Explorer out in the wild and need to manage the settings for them both. As you should know by now, Internet Explorer maintenance settings have been deprecated in favour of Group Policy preferences.

    The first thing to note is that even if you download the Group Policy templates for IE11 and install them correctly, you wont see an option for IE11, just IE10 and earlier.

    IE Group Policy

    Not to worry though, IE10 settings will apply just fine to IE11 and that is the desired behaviour. So, now you know how to configure settings for IE11, you might wonder how preferences for different versions of IE in the same policy would interact on the client machine. Well in the setup I looked at this had previously been done using item level targeting, which is in the common tab of the policy;

    IE Item Level Targeting

    The targeting was looking into the registry and checking for specific version strings which would only have the policy apply where the registry strings matched what was being checked;

    IE Item Level Targeting Registry Setting

    Now, while the above method would work it’s unnecessary. When you create a new setting within the policy, you’ll see some Item-level targeting is already put in place by Microsoft to ensure the settings only get applied to the right version IE on the client. The version of the IExplore.exe process running on the client machine is checked and then that is used to determine which IE settings to deploy from the GPO. So in my environment, as you can see below the settings would only apply to specific IE versions;

    IE Version Filters

    The XML file already contains all it needs to look for specific versions of IE, and as a result the various policies can co-exist with each other.

    In short, the item level targeting is done for you, no need to add any more targeting unless you need to filter things down further.