So in this demo, I'm going to do a couple of things to kind of illustrate what I just talked about.
The first thing I'm going to do is I'm on my client's system and I'm going to do it's called the Update
Command, which I'm about to talk about in detail.
But it's suffice to say that this is a way of manually forcing a group policy update.
And what's going on here is that my domain controller is not available, so I'm going to be trying to
update group policy while the domain controller is basically offline.
And we can see what happens when the client tries to run the group policy processing cycle.
So what you see is it's trying to run user policy updating and it's giving this message that processing
failed Windows cannot obtain the name of the domain controller.
So obviously a lack of a domain controller prevents group policy processing from succeeding completely.
Now the other piece of the puzzle that I wanted to sort of demo is how you can change the behavior of
group policy processing.
And so what I'm going to do is go ahead and bring back my domain controller and bring up group policy
management console.
And I'm just going to go ahead and edit a group policy.
And open up under computer configuration.
Administrative Templates.
System.
Group Policy.
And you see a lot of the options that I've mentioned in here.
So I can configure behavior for various group policy client side extensions.
For example, if I wanted the script CC to always process even over a slow link.
I could click this option here and apply it.
And any computers that process this policy will always run scripts, even if a slow link is detected.
I could also for security policy, for example, I could go ahead and say process this even if group
policy objects have not changed.
And what this effectively does is for the security client side extension only.
It will run during both foreground and background refresh cycles.
It will run and reprocess all the settings.
So instead of basically doing no work because nothing has changed, it will say it will sort of assume
that something's changed and reprocess all of those policies.
And I've seen organizations use that feature, especially for security policy, to ensure that if for
some reason somebody had gone in and managed to unset a security setting, a group policy processing
would come along.
You know, at 90 minute intervals or 5 minutes on server and reapply those security settings.
So these are the kinds of handy features you can use some of these configuration settings for to change
the default behavior of group policy under different circumstances.