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”

After expanding “Preferences” you will notice an options there that says PRINTERS. If you right click on Printers and select New > Shared Printer, the New Shared Printer Dialog Box will appear.

From here we can enter in the path to the shared printer and from the Action drop down menu select “Create”, but the best part is that you can place a tick in the “Set this printer as the default printer” box and it will make that printer the default. Interesting thing to note here though is that this check box is only available under a User Configuration and not the Computer Configuration. This is not what I wanted, I need to set a default printer for computers in a specific room.

So what I have done in enable User Group Policy Loop Back Processing under the Computer Configuration > Policies > Admin Templates > System > Group Policy, you can either set that to Merge or Replace. Now what that does is enable you to apply User Configurations to users that log onto those computers that this policy applies to.

This is the Good Part

Once you have created a shared printer to deploy there is a tab on the properties of that called “Common” , if you click on that and place a tick in the “Item Level Targeting” and click on the Targeting Button a whole new world opens up!

Click on the New Item and just have a look at the possibilities there. The one I was interested in was the Organisational Units option. Because what I want to happen is if a computer is in a specific OU install and make printer X the default.

With this option I was able to achieve just that. Just select the OU that the Computer should belong to by using the Browse Button and select the Computer in OU radio box.

Job Done……

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I was scrolling through my RSS Feeds this morning and saw a great article from the Technet Magazine. It is a “Utility Spotlight” article on SyncToy. Working in an education environment where students and staff for that matter are always coming to out office to get their computers re imaged or fixed for some other reason and when you ask them have they got a backup of their documents the standard response is “NO, Can’t you do that for me?”.

After having a play around with SyncToy I have found that this could be a cool little utility for alot of my users. It is a simple, easy to setup and install peice of software that will work on either XP or Vista. It works by having “Folder Pairs”, a Left Folder and a Right Folder. You can setup different Folder Pairs as well. For example I might want to create a folder pair for just my Photo’s and copy them to a specific network location, then I might have another folder pair for my documents and so on.

Let’s go ahead and create a Folder Pair, first of all start up SyncToy. You will then see the Welcome to SyncToy Screen:

Then Click the link in RED that says “Create New Folder Pair” and the Create New Folder Pair dialog box will appear:

On the Left Folder, browse to the folder on your local computer that you want copied and in the Right Folder, browse to the location you want to copy the files to, in my case it will be the Users Home Directory (H Drive). Then you will be presented with 3 Options:

Syncronize: New and Updated Files are copied BOTH ways, Renames and Deletes are repeated on both sides.
Echo: New and UIpdate Files are copied from Left to Right, Renames and Deletes on the left are repeated on the Right.
Contribute: new and Updated Files on the Left are Copied to the Right, renames on the left are repeated on the right NO DELETIONS

After you click Next, give your New Folder Pair a name and click Finish. You can know click the RUN Button on the bottom right hand side and SyncToy will do it’s thing.

As you can see it is Very Easy to install and setup up, great for those users who have trouble backing up their files !

Well this is the situation I am in at the moment, getting a new Notebook Image, Toshiba M750 Tablet, ready for deployment to about 150 students next year.

In the old days of an XP sysprep you could just leave the computer name blank in the sysprep file and as part of sysprep it would prompt you for the name of the computer. But in Vista there is a bug that if you leave the computer name out sysprep will NOT prompt you for one, and what is worse is that when you try and log in you get this error “The trust relationship between this workstation and the primary domain failed”. The work around for this is to use an asterix for the computer name. It will still generate a random name but at least you can login (this may have been fixed in SP1 though, I have not tested it yet). This is still no good for me.

In my research on how to get sysprep to prompt you for a computer name I found that you can add a custom script to windows setup. This script will run after sysprep is complete and before it gets to the login screen. There is a batch file called SetupComplete.cmd that if present in this location C:\Windows\Setup\Scripts will be executed after Windows has installed but before the login screen. This is GOLD !!!.

Next I got a script that prompts for a name for the computer, a username and password of an account that can change the name of a domain joined computer. VIEW THE VBS SCRIPT HERE.

I copied the script to the C:\Windows\Setup\Scripts folder then created a SetupComplete.cmd file in notepad an placed a call to the vbs script. Now what happens is after sysprep has run and a random computer name is generated and the machine is joined to the domain the machine reboots and you are prompted to change the name of the computer and supply a username and password for this operation to complete.

Job Done…….