The secret behind this is the use of Custom Lists and Item Level Permissions. What we need to do is create a custom list, so from the Site Actions Menu click Create, from the Custom List column click on Custom List. Give your list a name and click the Create Button.

Your List is now created, so next we go to Settings > List Settings and click on the Advanced Settings under the General Settings heading.

This will take you to the advanced settings page and reveil the “Secret”. Item-Level Permissions. The settings we want to take a look at and adjust here are Read Access and Edit Access, make the changes to Only Their Own for both settings. This means that when a student uploads a document they will only be able to see their own and only be able to edit their own.

I give Staff Members Full Control over these lists so they are able to see All the Documents that are submitted.

Photo Credit – Licht~~~~’s

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?

I decided to test this out as I have not come across this. Here is what I found, if you have a User Policy that is creating a printer connection and setting it as the default and you also have, using Loopback Policy Processing in Merge Mode, another User Policy being applied, this will override the first User Policy Settings. Both printers will be installed, but the default printer will be set to the one specified in the policy that has the loopback.

Note: I tested this on a client that has no printers installed

If Loopback Processing is in Replace Mode then the User Settings in that policy will “Replace” the settings in the other policy. Therefore only one printer will be installed and it will be set as default.

Hope that helps.

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

Right Click Drive Maps and select New > Mapped Drive Select Create from the drop down menu, enter the path to the share (eg. \\server\share ), I have created folders that relate to the students username therefore I used the %username% variable, select the Drive Letter.

Then from the Common tab up the top tick Item Level Targeting, from the New Item Menu select Security Group, make sure User In Group is selected in the bottom window and browse for the Security Group that the user must be a member of.

All Done, now all students that are a member of the Media Security Group will get an M Drive Mapped.

Cheers

Daniel Anderson
Loving Group Policy Preferences

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……

For More Tips on how you can use Group Policy Preferences make sure you SUBSCRIBE to my RSS Feed so you don’t miss out on making your life as a Network Administrator an easier one !!!

Microsoft updates Windows 7 SDK beta
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32-bit support optional for Server 2008 R2 Server Core
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Just a quick one today, I had a client come to me this morning with their Lenovo R61 notebook with Vista as the OS, complaining that they couldn’t get their wireless connection working. After a clean reboot the Error Dialog box that cam up said “Error Code: 1747 WLAN AutoConfig service failed to start”. So I tried to open up Event Viewer to have a look and that failed to load as well stating that the Windows Event Log Service failed to start.

So I opened up the Services MMC and tried to manually start the Windows Event Log Service and no luck, didn’t start. SO I did a bit of hunting and found that it could be related to a corrupt Windows Vista TCP/IP Winsock Catalog. So I ran the following command in the command prompt with admin privileges.

netsh winsock reset

What this does is reset the Winsock Catalog to a clean state or default configuration. After a reboot everything was fine.

What was interesting to note was that Windows automatically created a 200mb hidden partition which is used to hold the Boot Data Configuration (BCD) and the Windows Recovery Environment and actually only uses 32Mb of the allocated 200Mb. One thing to note here is that it is very hard to remove this partition after it is created and if you do then you risk your computer not booting again!

But if you are like me and wanted to take an image of the machine so that you can put it on another machine to test as well then this “hidden partition” can cause some issues. There are ways to avoid this partition from being created and there is a great article explaining it here..

One of the first things that I was impressed with and was a common comment on Twitter was the speed at which it booted and logged in, much better than Vista in my opinion. The other thing was the task bar. Let’s say you have more than one tab open in Internet Explorer you can hover over the IE Icon in the task bar and have the tabs that you have open appear separately and you can then just click on the one that you want to open (see below)

Another little change which may throw a few people (my clients especially who LOVE change) is that Folders are now called Libraries, so you know have a Document Library, Picture Library etc etc.

Now what I found really cool was you now have the ability to Create and Attach VHD Files through Disk Management, which from an admin point of view is great because you can now attach modify VHD files.

One thing that is really important for me and other network admins is Remote Server Administration and Microsoft have released a Windows 7 version or RSAT that you can grab from here. This installed fine and once enabled through Control Panel > Programs and Features > Turn Windows Features on or off they were up and running. I turned on DNS Server Tools, Hyper-V Tools, File Server Resource Manager Tools, AD DS Tools and Group Policy Management Tools and they all work well.

So far I have been impressed with this version. I am still testing out a few things and will post anything that I find impressive or NOT so make sure you SUBSCRIBE to my RSS Feed or better still Follow Me on Twitter

Cheers

Daniel
Continuing to test Windows 7

If you are using Hyper-V or are considering using it then grab this and have a read. Grab it here…..

After reading Virtual PC guy’s article on the Import and Export feature of Hyper-V I thought I would give this a go. I needed to move 2 Exchange 2007 Servers, one holding the Mailstore Role and the other the Hub Transport Role, from one Hyper-V Server to another. Let me say if you ever need to do this then this way is a MUST.

First shutdown the current Virtual Machine, Select it in the “Virtual Machines” window, then on the right hand side you will see a link that say export. Click that and you will then need to select an Export Path, in my case C:\export. After you click OK a folder will be created inside that export folder and it will be the same name as the Virtual Machine that you are exporting.

After that has completed, you can then copy that folder to the new Hyper-V Server and rather than selecting export we want to select Import Virtual Machine. Make sure you allow enough time for this copy process, it took me a couple of hours to copy 78GB !!!. After selecting Import Virtual Machine you will need to select the actual folder that you copied and not the parent folder. Eg. If you copied the exported folder into a folder called “Import”, then do not select the Import folder, select the folder inside that. In my case inside my Import folder was my virtual machine FHS-MAILSTORE.

NOTE: Be sure to copy the Exported Machine to the location that would want it to be BEFORE you actually do the Import……

After the import has completed (for me about 10sec) fire up the Machine and away you go……….

I now have a fully “Virtual” Microsoft Exchange 2007 Environment. What I can’t wait for is the new Live Migration that will be part of Windows Server 2008 R2…..

Happy Hyper-V ing……

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)

Now I am going to be keeping the same computer name on the new Virtual Edge Server, so I did this next.

Shutdown the current Exchange Server and then Reset the Computer Account in Active Directory. Next was to start up the NEW Exchange Server, rename it and join it to the domain. You MUST make sure that the drive letter configuration is the same as the OLD Server.

Next Install Exchange, I did this by running trying to run this command:

Setup.com /Role:Edge

This is where it all fell apart. I got an error and decided to try again by running the setup.exe file. Sure enough it was No Good and I received this Error “The Exchange Server is in an inconsistant state”. Then I tried to run the install in Recovery Mode by using this command:

setup.com /m:RecoverServer

Guess what? Failed again. Things were looking pretty grim. Considering this was a virtual machine and only hosting the Edge Transport Role I copied across a sysprepped Windows Server 2008 VHD that I created earlier and started from scratch.

While the Server was starting up I reset the Computer Account in Active Directory and I also need to get brutal and use ADSi Edit and remove the entry in the following location:

CN=Configuration, DC= Domain Name, DC=com, CN=Services, CN=Microsoft Exchange, CN=, CN=Administrative Groups, CN= , CN=Servers, CN=

and also remove the entry in the Exchange Servers and Exchange Install Domain Servers Security Groups.

The Server was now up and running and joined to the domain so I tried again to install Exchange 2007 and the Edge Transport Role, and all seemed to go through fantastically!

After Exchange was installed I then need to run the New-EdgeSubscription CMDLET on the Edge Server:

New-EdgeSubscription -FileName “c:\EdgeServerSubscription.xml”

Then import that XML File on the Server that is running the Hub Transport Role. To to that you can use the Exchange Management Console and navigate to this spot.

Organisation Configuration > Hub Transport > and then click the Edge Subscription Tab.

After that was completed I gave the Edge Server a Restart and the mail started flowing in again…….There seemed to be a few people that have had a similar issue so I hope this sheds some light on a procedure on how to get around this issue. Another bonus to virtualization !!!!.