Windows Server Administration

Had an interesting question from a reader in response to setting a default printer with Group Policy Preferences that I thought I would share.

Question was:
If you set a user general default printer like the main office copier but also set a location printer preference like the library copier using the loop back policy will it over ride the general default printer preference?

Do I merge or replace?
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The other day I wrote an article on how I use Group Policy Preferences to Deploy Printers and Set the Default Printer. Today I wanted to share with you how I go about mapping network drives to particular users based on their AD DS Group Memberships. In days gone by this was don via a vbs login in script, but let me show you how this can be done via GPP.

Simple scenario, we have a group of Media students that need a drive mapped to a different “Media Backup Server”, so what I have done is put these students into and Active Directory Group called “Media Students”.

So in my Students GPO I simply went to User Configuration > Preferences > Windows Settings > Drive Maps

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The job of deploying printers and setting default printers has been quite simply a pain in the butt. Well automating the default printer has been anyway. Now if you are like me and work in an educational environment where there are computer labs, left right and center, libraries, staff notebooks (separated on different campuses), student notebooks etc etc and users all wanting to print to specific printers and of course people not wanting to select the correct one from a list of printers then read on.

Use Group Policy Preferences !!!

In the past I have used the Print Management Console to deploy the printers via Group Policy, now that did work very well, but there was still the “overlooked” problem of being able to set the default printer. To get around this what I used to do was to name the computers in a certain way and then have a vbs script that would get the name of the printer and then set the default based on the computer name.

I was reading an article by GPO Guru Derek Melber about the new Group Policy Preferences that come with Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista and thought I would explore this option.

To start off your client will need the Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions both XP and Vista Clients need these. Now you can manually download these and install via a computer startup script via Group Policy or if you have a WSUS Server then you can make this “Feature Pack” available via Windows Updates (this is the option I took, less work!).

Now that you have the Group Policy Preference Client Side Extensions installed on the clients, you can go ahead and play with the GPO’s. If you open up the Group Policy Management snap in and edit a GPO object you will see “Preferences”

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OK Here we go back in the swing of things and the first server I am going to “Virtualize” is an Exchange 2007 Server that holds the Edge Server Role. After Reading this article it all seemed fairly straight forward. How wrong I was !!! Here is what I did that led me to this unwanted ERROR “The Exchange Server is in an inconsistant state” when I was trying to install the Edge Transport Role on the new Hyper-V Virtual Server.

The first thing that needed to be done was an export of the current server configuration using, as Microsoft calls it, “cloned configuration tasks”. There is a folder located in the install directory of Exchange, generally C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\ called “Scripts”. Inside there are 2 Powershell Scripts that you will need.

They are ExportEdgeConfig.ps1 and ImportEdgeConfig.ps1.

To capture the configuration we need to run the ExportEdgeConfig.ps1 script in the Exchange Management Shell like so:

./ExportEdgeConfig -CloneConfigData:”C:\CloneConfigData.xml”

NOTE: Make Sure you run the Exchange Management Shell as Administrator (right click > Run As Administrator)
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I have been reading a bit about wireless security over the past week, as it is part of the 70-642 MCTS Exam “Configuring Windows 2008 Network Infrastructure” that I am currently studying (I will be sitting the exam in the next week or two, so subscribe to my RSS Feed so you don’t miss out on some inside tips !!!). We are curently running a wireless infrastructure with Cisco 1200 Access Points, a Windows 2003 Radius Server and using WEP 128bit (keys auto rotated every hour) encryption and Auto Enrolled Certificates from our Windows 2003 CA for authentication. This has been working pretty well, but with WPA2, an updated version of WPA and comes in two flavours WPA2-PSK and WPA2-EAP, it offers improved security and better protection from attacks. Now if all clients can support WPA2-EAP then this should be your first choice.

To kick things off you first of all need a PKI Infrustructure and enable autoenrollment so that all your wireless clients obtain the correct certificates for the authentication process.

1. Install the Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) Role to the server and just use the default settings here.

2. Next Open up the Group Policy Management Console and either edit a policy or create a new one to apply the wireless settings to your clients. The section we want is Computer Configuration\Policies\Windows Settings\Security Settings\Public Key Policies. In the details pane now you need to right click the Certificate Services Client – Autoenrollment and then select properties. In the Properties dialog box select enabled from the rop down box and then place a tick in the other boxes, which is optional.
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Continuing on with my Hyper-V Virtual Machine installations, I moved onto a Windows 2008 Print Server after yesterday I spoke about How To Migrate a Windows 2003 DHCP Server to a Windows 2008 Server. These virtuals are x64 based VM’s and as I found out after adding the Print Services Role to the server and then installing a printer to share and connecting to that printer from a 32bit XP Client the server didn’t have appropriate drivers installed and asked me to locate the driver files.

90% of my printers are HP ones so I went to the HP website and downloaded the most recent driver, it turns out they have a “HP Universal PCL 6″ driver. Now this driver appears to do, as the name suggests, provide the correct drivers to all HP Printers!.

To get the x86 drivers onto the x64 Windows 2008 Server you need to connect to the server from the x86 client and open up the printer and faxes share. THen from the File Menu select Server Properties, then from the Driver Tab add the x86 drivers that you downloaded, and they will then be uploaded to the server.

Another catch here is that both x86 and x64 drivers MUST have the same name. If they have the same name, they will appear automatically in additional drivers for both architectures in your printer’s sharing properties.

Well I got another Hyper-V host up and running today which will house a couple of VM on it, a Domain Controller which will also have DNS and DHCP installed and also a Print Server. I have set it up with 3 Logical Drives consisting of a Mirrored OS, Hardware Raid-10 for the VHD and Hyper-V data and another single drive that will have the Shadow Copies of the Raid-10 Volume on it.

The Install of the Active Directory Domain Services went great and obviously DNS was installed along the way. I also made this one a Global Catalog Server.

How To Migrate Windows 2003 DHCP to Windows 2008 DHCP Server

Next up was migrating the DHCP from the old Windows 2003 Server to this new box, below is how I did this:

First export the DHCP Database from the 2003 Server with the following command:

netsh dhcp server export C:\dhcp.txt all

Then copy that file to the new 2008 Server. Add the DHCP Server Role on the new box via Server Manager. Then with the following command import the dhcp database:

netsh dhcp server import C:\dhcp.txt all

Now when I did this I got this error “Error while importing option “6.” “This option conflicts with the existing option “” An Internal Error Occurred.”.

This was to do with the fact that while adding the DHCP Server Role to the new machine there were entries in the Server Options that were done automatically, once I went in and removed these options “006 DNS Servers” and “015 DNS Domain Name” and then re did the import with the string above everything went fine.

Next up Print Server. Subscribe to my RSS Feed so you can see how I managed this.

By the way there is a great article and script from John Howard that enables you to Configure Hyper-V Remote Management in Seconds.

I have been reading quite a lot of posts lately on how effective the performance of Windows 2008 Server is when using it as a Desktop Operating System. Tim has also written and article over at his blog with some interesting points. Now apparently it performs better than Vista SP1 which is something I am going to have to try out on my notebook.

I have a Toshiba M400 Tablet Notebook that currently has Vista SP1 installed and like many other I am not that rapt with the performance so I am going to give Windows Server 2008 a crack and see what the performance difference is like.

Stay Tuned………

A couple of days ago I wrote about some issues I was having with one of my Hyper-V Virtual Machines and the snapshots that were associated with it causing my System Drive (C Drive) to run out of disk space. From what I was reading if you turn off the Virtual Machine in question a merging process will be conducted and the AVHD Files that are associated with the VHD File will merge together and form one file, a VHD one. This is what I was after.

I was reading and article by “The Virtual PC Guy’s” on Snapshotting under Hyper-V, and I determined that if I deleted the snapshots then the AVHD Files should be merged? But for some reason they did not merge?. Anyway the way to get these files merged to their parent VHD file (for me anyway) was to turn the VM off and just let the merge take place. Now I thought this process would take some time so I scheduled it for Friday night, my VM was a Microsoft Exchange Server, sureley no one would be checking their emails on a Friday Night !

I had 3 AVHD files that I wanted to get rid of, so I turned the VM Off and the “Merge in Progress” appeared in the Hyper-V Manager so I let it run it’s course. About 50 mins later the merge process was complete and 2 of the AVHD Files just VANISHED, great! but there was still one left? So I decided to turn the VM off again and what do you know another Merger was taking place, so again I left this happen and after it had completed the final AVHD File dissappeared and I was left with one VHD File, FANTASTIC!

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Here is a task that most Network Administrators will face at one time or another, moving User Home Directories from one Server to another. We are in the process of organising new Servers for 2009 and these will be Windows Server 2008 and the current Servers are running on Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition. Now currently our Home Folders are individually shared as hidden shares, and I want to move to a convention of a parent shared User Folder with individual folders for each user in there that are not shared.

Now I wanted to explore the PowerShell option to copy from the source server to the destinsation server and keep the NTFS Permissions intact after the copy, as I have previosuly used PowerShell to do a bulk import of users into Active Directory and that woked a treat. I was a bit dissapointed with the PowerShell options using GET-ACL and SET-ACL because I could do individual folders one at a time but that would take forever, and I couldn’t see an easy way to iterate through them….

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