So I want to round out this chapter by talking about a utility or capability, but I showed briefly
in the previous demo, and that's the ability to trigger manual processing.
So outside of our normal foreground and background processing, you can actually force a manual processing
cycle to occur.
Now remember, way back in the first module, I talked about the fact that group policy is always pulled,
is always pulled by the client.
And this manual processing doesn't really change that equation.
It's still applied by the client.
But essentially what you're doing with this manual triggering of processing is you're telling the client
to manually pull at that point.
And there's really three ways to do this.
There's the pop data XY command line utility that ships with pretty much all versions of Windows.
There's the Invoke Update PowerShell complete that was delivered in Windows eight as part of the group
policy PowerShell module.
I'm not really going to go in depth on that in this module because I have a whole module later on dedicated
to group policy and PowerShell.
But for right now suffice to say that that invoke update can take can basically do the same thing as
the update command line utility.
And then finally added in server 2012 and 2012 were two and Windows eight X is the ability to do a kind
of g UI based update from PMC.
So this is the kind of a screenshot of the update command and you'll see there's a number of command
line switches you can use.
You can either target specifically computer or user policy updating, so you don't have to do both.
The default is if I just type updated will do a normal update manual processing of both computer and
user side policy.
So there's a few other options here.
I'm not going to go into all of them.
You can read the descriptions.
But the one that's probably most interesting and most often used is pup date slash force and pup date
slash force.
His job in life is to essentially ignore the rule that says don't do any processing.
If nothing has changed and it goes ahead and acts as if everything has changed, enforces all of the
client side extensions to reprocess all of the policies that apply to the computer of the user at that
time.
So it's a good sort of catch all command to issue if you're not getting the policy that you expect to
see and you think it might be related to the fact that the computer or the user hasn't yet received
that policy.
So a little bit more about the switches and some of the common switches.
So again, pup date, no command line switches performs a normal background refresh of processing for
computer and user.
Pop date slash force performs a full update, ignoring whether GPOs have changed.
And as an example, if you wanted to just target, for example, all the user side of policy on user
configuration of policy for the currently logged on user, you could just perform a normal background
refresh using the slash target user.
Or if you wanted to target the computer, you could just say slash target computer.
Again, this is done at the client that you want to refresh policy on.
It can't be run cannot be run remotely.
I'll talk about how you can do that with the GMC.
But essentially, this is a local command only.
Now, I did talk about AMC having this new feature in Windows eight and Server 2012.
And that's the ability to do a UI based update, slash force on an o u so you can actually target all
the computers in an O you to do group policy refreshes on them.
And this screenshot kind of shows you what that looks like.
I've chosen the marketing for you in this case, and it's telling me that it's going to go out and detect
all of the computers in the marketing or you and any subclass underneath it, and essentially do a update
slash force on those computers remotely.
So this does require some access to the remote computers, administrative access.
It requires the ability to access the remote computer via WMI because that's the underlying protocol
that it's using to do this.
So there is some firewall holes you may need to poke into your client machine that you're trying to
update to get this to work.
But essentially it's giving you that ability to kind of remotely say, go get all of the policy that
you need to get.