Group Policy Preferences – What Takes Preference?

Posted on by Adam Fowler
How do you know if one Group Policy Preference occurs before another?

Hi again everyone,

Today I’m sharing something that I have just found out about, thanks to the very helpful Alan Burchill (Twitter) who is a MVP in Group Policy. Thanks Alan!

So, I’ve talked about Group Policy Preferences before – wonderful, and not widely used enough yet – but they’ll do pretty much anything you could do with a login script with the added benefits of high granularity, GUID and targeting based on almost any criteria you can think of rather than writing complex scripts and error reporting in event viewer.

I came into a scenario where I needed to delete all of the files in a directory, then copy several files back into that same directory. As I created this, I then wondered how I’d make sure that the delete occured before the copy. If it happened the other way around, the end result would be an empty directory!

If you’re doing multiple settings of the same type, then they get an Order number as per the screenshot below. You can move the order around, to make sure things occur in their proper turn. Something like environmnet variables may need this, since your second variable may use the first variable as part of it’s path, and if it was the wrong order then you wouldn’t have the first environment variable set before it was called:

gppenv

Simple enough. But, what if you need an environment variable in place before you map a drive using that variable? The next screenshot is from the same policy, using one of the variables above to map a drive. But, if you look at the order number, it’s also a 1. The order is only relevant for items in that same area (as per this example, Drive Maps).

 gppdrive

 

 

How do you know what will happen first? This is what Alan Burchill found out for me. There is a set order in which each client side extension runs, and to view this you need to delve into the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\GPExtensions

 

gppreg

The order is based on the GUID. I’ve highlighted the second one, which is Group Policy Environment – the environment variables. They’re all self explanatory once you click on them, or you can search what you’re looking for and then ensure that they are in the order you need them to be. There’s one exception to this, which is {35378EAC-683F-11D2-A89A-00C04FBBCFA2} but that’s a blank entry… possibly so you can force something to be first if needed? We’re not quite sure on that bit!

I hope that helps you if you ever run into this sort of thing. There are other workarounds you can do, such as creating two seperate GPO’s and put those GPO’s in the correct order, but best practise is to have as few GPO’s as possible.Anyway, for my example above, the environment variables come before drive mappings which is {5794DAFD-BE60-433f-88A2-1A31939AC01F} so we’re safe.

How I started in I.T.

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,
I thought this would be a good discussion point. I’m sure we have some readers who have a passion for I.T. but may not know where to start for their career, and there’d be some interesting stories on how some of us managed to get our way into the industry.

Personally, growing up I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do – but I did know that I liked computers, and spent a lot of time on them from a very young age. My Dad was a computer technician in the hardware and building PC’s sense – so I sort of assumed I’d do that. After doing some work experience with him, and being put on a production line (he was higher up than that) being told to sort out a box of screws to different sizes, I decided I probably didn’t want to be a computer technician after all.
After finishing high school, I then had an opportunity to do two weeks work at my Dad’s new place of employment, where he was the systems builder and tester. I was excited to be earning $13 an hour back in mid 1999 but the job was pretty much just building PC’s out of components, installing an image and testing that the basics worked. Again, it put me off being a computer technician, but I had no idea what else to do.

I then decided I’d do a TAFE course in Diploma of I.T. It would take 3 years to do, and from what I can remember, the first lessons I had were: Programming (something I knew I didn’t want to do), Networking (Interested in this but was too basic so lost interest), Flow Charts (this wasn’t what the course was called, but that’s all it seemed to be and was incredibly boring) and I don’t even remember the other two. I didn’t last long, dropped out and gave up on my IT career as I still didn’t really know what I wanted.

Jump forward 6 months, and I ended up applying for a call centre job. It paid well for a 19 year old ($28k back in late 2000) and thought I might as well give it a try and see how it went. 3 months into this job, and IT role came up in the company, to support the call centre itself. I considered applying, but missed the deadline and thought I won’t bother because I have no experience. The job came up again, as no suitable applicants had applied yet. This time I thought that I might as well give it a shot, and actually got it! From then on, my career continuted to be in I.T.

That’s how my I.T. career started, and despite my efforts, I landed a job. Part of it was dumb luck, part passion of a hobby, and partly being able to demonstrate the right skills and knowledge requierd. I had no qualifications or formal training either!

So, what can I tell you from all this? Aim to do what you want, and if you don’t know – just try something else. You might find a job you like, but even if you don’t it will open up more opportunities, contacts and experiences to help your career along.

Hopefully some of you can share your stories below as myself and others would love to read.

How did you get into I.T. ?

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I thought this would be a good discussion point. I’m sure we have some readers who have a passion for I.T. but may not know where to start for their career, and there’d be some interesting stories on how some of us managed to get our way into the industry.

Personally, growing up I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do – but I did know that I liked computers, and spent a lot of time on them from a very young age. My Dad was a computer technician in the hardware and building PC’s sense – so I sort of assumed I’d do that. After doing some work experience with him, and being put on a production line (he was higher up than that) being told to sort out a box of screws to different sizes, I decided I probably didn’t want to be a computer technician after all.

After finishing high school, I then had an opportunity to do two weeks work at my Dad’s new place of employment, where he was the systems builder and tester. I was excited to be earning $13 an hour back in mid 1999 but the job was pretty much just building PC’s out of components, installing an image and testing that the basics worked. Again, it put me off being a computer technician, but I had no idea what else to do.

I then decided I’d do a TAFE course in Diploma of I.T. It would take 3 years to do, and from what I can remember, the first lessons I had were: Programming (something I knew I didn’t want to do), Networking (Interested in this but was too basic so lost interest), Flow Charts (this wasn’t what the course was called, but that’s all it seemed to be and was incredibly boring) and I don’t even remember the other two. I didn’t last long, dropped out and gave up on my IT career as I still didn’t really know what I wanted.

Jump forward 6 months, and I ended up applying for a call centre job. It paid well for a 19 year old ($28k back in late 2000) and thought I might as well give it a try and see how it went. 3 months into this job, and IT role came up in the company, to support the call centre itself. I considered applying, but missed the deadline and thought I won’t bother because I have no experience. The job came up again, as no suitable applicants had applied yet. This time I thought that I might as well give it a shot, and actually got it! From then on, my career continuted to be in I.T.

That’s how my I.T. career started, and despite my efforts, I landed a job. Part of it was dumb luck, part passion of a hobby, and partly being able to demonstrate the right skills and knowledge requierd. I had no qualifications or formal training either!

So, what can I tell you from all this? Aim to do what you want, and if you don’t know – just try something else. You might find a job you like, but even if you don’t it will open up more opportunities, contacts and experiences to help your career along.

Hopefully some of you can share your stories below as myself and others would love to read.

CCNA – CCENT Study Experience

Posted on by Adam Fowler

I thought I’d share with you my experience with taking the first steps to be Cisco certified. I didn’t really know what to expect when I started, but hopefully for anyone else considering doing their CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) or CCENT (Cisco Certified Entry Networking Technician).

This is part 1 of 2, as I’ve only gone so far as doing CCENT. It’s half way to becoming a qualified CCNA, and a lot of good fundementals in general networking. To explain further, the first half of the CCNA course is called CCENT 1 (which is just CCENT) and the second half is CCENT 2. You can either do a seperate exam for CCENT 1 & 2, or just a full CCNA exam which contains questions from both courses.

At this point, I’ll quickly mention that if you’ve done your CCNA pre 2007, the course changed and became a LOT harder. So if you see someone’s resume listing CCNA, find out when they did it. Also, Cisco certs are only valid for 3 years unless you do another exam!

So what did I do? I started by getting my employer to pay for me to do a week at DDLS (Dimension Data Learning Services) to study in a classroom environment. I really enjoyed this. The general topics covered were:

  • What is a Network?
  • OSI 7 layer model
  • TCP/UDP basics
  • Ethernet – LANs, Switches, Hubs, Routers
  • Wireless basics
  • Subnetting and Binary
  • Cisco basic router configuration
  • DHCP router configuration
  • Static and dynamic routing
  • WAN basics, including NAT
  • Management and security of Cisco routers

This is actually a lot to take in for a week. You might look at this list and go ‘yeah I know all that stuff it’s easy!’ But this course really gets down to the whys and hows, not just ‘Do X and Y happens’. You start to understand what’s really involved when you do anything on a network – what data gets put into a packet, how the packet gets from A to B, what changes and stays the same… many people have a general grasp to get by, but you’ll get a proper understanding of how data goes down through the 7 OSI layers and back up again at the other end. What’s the OSI model? Have a quick read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model

Anyway, I got through the week and was keenly learning the whole time. I thought I pretty much knew it all, and was ready to go sit the exam. A few things happened, and it ended up being 2 months before I sat it. A few days before I flicked through the books provided to refresh myself, and confidently went in to take the exam.

Now, there’s a few things about the exam you should know. Firstly, it’s 1 1/2 hours long – and you’ll pretty much need all that time even if you know what you’re doing. Secondly, there’s labs in the exam – so it’s not just multiple choice, but you have to log onto routers and switches, run commands, work out what the answers are and pick the correct choice. Thirdly, you can’t go back once you OK a question. This means time management is really important, as you can’t just fly through once then go through again to re-think your difficult questions, or try and work out answers based on previous questions. You can’t even go back and look at what you answered previously.

Despite all this, I had been told subnetting was a really important part of the exam, and that’s what you should focus on so you can calculate it all in your head. I practised and managed to do this, so walked in confidently…and failed. I was also told, people can do these exams 2-4 times on average, so don’t expect to get it right first time.

I took another week to study, and failed again! I’d learnt everything I wasn’t sure in the exam, but the second time I took it none of those questions even came up, and there was a second bunch of questions I really wasn’t sure of! Even more annoyingly though, I failed by ~1 question.

Third time lucky? Yes. I passed, and was very relieved to get it behind me. I can tell you this is a very difficult exam, and you need to know a huge amount of stuff (both logically and just brain dumps of terminoligies and acronyms) to be able to pass. For example, DHCP – you don’t need to just understand what it’s for, but you may need to know what TCP commands are sent between the server and client, and what order they’re in. You’ll need to have a full understanding of the contents of a TCP packet, and what information changes in it depending where it is on the network. You’ll even need a full understanding of a Cisco switch and how it’s configuration might have security risks, and what you’d need to change, plus remember those commands off the top of your head. You’ll need to convert IP addresses like 192.168.1.44/29 into the network mask 255.255.255.248, and know that the network address is 192.168.1.40 with a broadcast address of 192.168.1.47 leaving you 6 available hosts (I hope that’s right as I worked it out as I went along :) ). What are the channels available on wireless, and which ones should you use and why? What are all the differences between 802.11a, b & g?

So the point I’m trying to make here is there’s a lot to know, but it’s all really good information to have. Once I did the course, I went back to work and really had a much better understanding of what was going on generally, instead of just knowing ‘if I put this here, it works’ I now know why.

You don’t need to go to a classroom though, there’s some great books available, as well as resources like CBT Nuggets which are training videos, very similar to a classroom setup.

I’d recommend this course to anyone who deals with networking, even on a fairly basic level. You’ll need to commit yourself to studying and knowing the contents of the course inside out, but you’ll come out the other end much more knowledgeable and confident of what’s happening on the networks you use.

iPad2 Review

Posted on by Adam Fowler

It’s an Apple product launch day, so fanboys and haters are all excited to see what’s come out of the pome factory (an apple is a type of pome, thanks wikipedia).

The iPad 2 by all accounts, is a whole 1 better than the iPad 1, even though the iPad 1 wasn’t actually called an iPad 1. What does this extra 1 mean?

It’s thinner, 33% smaller. Smaller is better!

It’s faster, 100% faster CPU. What that really means is it’s a dual core. It’s also 900% faster in the graphics department, which to me indicates the iPad 1 didn’t have very good graphics. I think part of this is that some high graphics quality games have started to come out in the App Store, and really a lot of people want an iPad as a casual gaming device.

It’s got cameras. Two! Just like your iPhone 4! The front is VGA, so facetime chats are the only thing it’s good for. The back camera will take 5 megapixel stills, and record video at 720p. At least that’s what I can make out, there’s so much misinformation on the web about the iPad 2. One site claimed it was only a 1 megapixel camera, but magical devices have higher resolution cameras than that.

It’s got a battery! You can’t swap over or get to it, and it’s got the same battery life as the iPad 1 – about 10 hours of use.

It’s got a screen! The exact same one as the iPad 1. A bit surprising there, so those of you spoilt with RETINA DISPLAY on your iPhone 4’s may complain about being able to see the pixels. Then again, you’re probably taking your iPad to bed with you and cuddling it as you fall asleep, with your fancy sleep rythm apps and sex positions to study… sorry I’m getting sidetracked here.

It has HDMI out*! *If you buy a US$40 adapter. At first this sounds amazing, but then why would you want to game with an iPad plugged into a TV? isn’t that what consoles are for? In a business environment, I could see someone plugging it in to a projector and displaying fancy pie charts showing how your company could improve profits by 2% if they changed over to single ply toilet paper.

And the big one…

You can get it in black OR white! No longer will whitey be opressed with vague promises of existance to the masses (because you know, Stephen Fry has a white iPhone 4), to be crushed time after time again. Of course you’re probably putting a case over it anyway, but it doesn’t matter what’s on the outside, it’s the inside that counts.

Summary:

It’s a bit better, but even moreso if you have an iPad one, no reason to upgrade unless you can poop money somehow. If so, feel free to use my toilet but don’t flush. Once some more powerful apps and games come out to use the extra power, then maybe you’ve got a good reason. I’m not sure why the normal person would take a picutre of anything using a giant pad, rather than say their mobile phone – but there’s always someone with a specific need.

Sources:

http://www.padgadget.com/2011/03/02/ipad-2-specs-out-dual-core-a5-baby/

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/ipad-ipad2-ipad-2,news-10329.html

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/03/02/ipad-2-to-feature-hdmi-output/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pome