Busy Saving The World - John Delizo's Tech Blog

Understanding Performance and Reliability Monitoring

Performance and Reliability monitor (PerfMon) is a very powerful new tool that has been shipped with Windows Server 2008 that can collect data about everything and anything on your windows system. 

Lets explore this part of the Windows Server 2008 that has been less noticed and less used, do check my posts here: http://johndelizo.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!5686721B6E7BA618!1555.entry. Also check out PerfMon at TechNet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc755081.aspx

Windows Server 2008 Manageability Feature: Group Policy Preferences: Part 8 Item Level Targeting

One of the features of Group Policy Preferences is to do Item Level Targeting. This enables you to filter out your targets to specific items so that you can implement a Group Policy Preference on a higher Organizational Unit node in the Domain. What this does is a single declaration of your new Policy and have it filter down rather than creating a copy and then applying it to individual OU's. You may also opt to use WMI filtering but sometimes a script can have errors.

An example is to create a filter to apply this preference to this OU but its not logged on a portable computer.

Windows Server 2008 Manageability Feature: Group Policy Preferences: Part 7 Network Shares

With the Group Policy Preferences, we can now deploy Network Shares by just going to either the Computer or User Configuration, navigate to the PREFERENCES, then expand Windows Settings. On the Network Shares icon, right click new and then Click Network Share.

On the New Network Share Properties, you can choose the action to Create, Replace,  Update or Delete. These different actions that are normally done in Group Policy preferences which is briefly explained here.

Windows Server 2008 Manageability Feature: Group Policy Preferences: Part 6 Internet Options

Having a new build of machines that will be deployed as corporate workstations, and you need to set the DEFAULT home page of each of these machines, depending upon their group? Or just want to publish a new  You can use Group policy preference to set their initial home page of their Internet explorer.

Via group policy preference Internet settings extension, we have assigned default or new home page for our targeted computers. Users can change those if they wanted to, flexible but effective.

Windows Server 2008 Manageability: Feature Group Policy Preferences : Part 5 Shortcuts

What if now you want to just create new shortcuts on your users desktops? Say because its a new corporate SharePoint portal, or just your newly deployed application or a shared document? Or just want to deploy default shortcuts newly installed images?

Here a sample and how it was deployed in our network :D, hope its useful to you as much as it is to me.

As like the other samples that we did before, we used this reference for Group Policy Preferences on Windows Server 2008.

Windows Server 2008 Manageability Feature: Group Policy Preferences: Part 4 Services

If you also have this scenario, for some reason you need to disable the DHCP client service (DHCP) on all machines since you are using static IP and your policy dictates that you can never get DHCP.  How about Windows Audio Service (AudioSrv)? And those service may be started by the end user if he/she has local admin rights to launch services.msc

With Group Policy Preferences on Windows Server 2008 Services Extension you can accomplish this. A simple how-to was posted here.