{"id":1619,"date":"2014-07-17T17:51:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T00:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebeagle.itgroove.net\/?p=1619"},"modified":"2023-02-24T21:39:55","modified_gmt":"2023-02-24T21:39:55","slug":"active-directorywhere-did-my-gpo-templates-go","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/regroove.ca\/archive\/2014\/07\/17\/active-directorywhere-did-my-gpo-templates-go\/","title":{"rendered":"Active Directory\u2013Where did my GPO templates go????"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a short post to highlight something I stumbled across the other day.<\/p>\n

One of our customers has been bought out by a much larger company and the new parent company is in the process of transitioning my customer\u2019s systems into the parent company\u2019s infrastructure.\u00a0 One of the parent company\u2019s sysadmins was working in my customer\u2019s AD trying to build some GPO\u2019s and he ran into problems.\u00a0 He called me to see if I could offer any insight.\u00a0 Together we went digging.\u00a0 What we found was interesting.<\/p>\n

He was trying to build a simple GPO but the \u201cnormal\u201d things that you would see on a policy (being built from the default templates) seemed to be missing.<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A number of the items inside the green circle above simply weren\u2019t there.\u00a0 I was stumped.\u00a0 But we did notice that there were some GPO\u2019s that had been created that had Office templates associated with them and they seemed to display correctly.<\/p>\n

I gave it a bit of thought and recalled that a fellow that had worked for us for a short period of time had played with Office GPO\u2019s on the customer domain to try and solve a weird issue we had with default file locations for Office documents.\u00a0 As the Office templates are not a \u201cdefault\u201d part of the GPO templates I went digging on the DC and discovered a folder in SYSVOL:<\/p>\n

\"SNAGHTML500402\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

There were all of the .admx and .adml files that made up the Office templates in that folder and its subfolders.\u00a0 Hmmmmm.\u00a0 Further investigation also showed that all of the GPO\u2019s listed templates as follows:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Hmmmm, again.\u00a0 Looking at a DC at another customer and the GPO\u2019s listed as follows:<\/p>\n

\"image\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Doing a little Google search came back with instructions on how to create a \u201cCentral Store\u201d for GPO template files and, as it turns out, the Central Store is none other than the \u201cPolicy Definitions\u201d folder that I discovered in SYSVOL!<\/p>\n

In a \u201cvanilla\u201d AD installtion, the GPO template files are pulled from each DC\u2019s local template store which is \u201cC:WindowsPolicyDefinitions\u201d.\u00a0 As soon as you create the Policy Definitions folder in your SYSVOL the system (meaning ALL DC\u2019s) will start looking for ALL template files in the Central Store.\u00a0 Therefore, you must copy the contents of your C:WindowsPolicyDefinitions into your C:WindowsSYSVOLdomainPoliciesPolicyDefinitions folder.\u00a0 If you do NOT then you\u2019ll hit the same problem that I have been describing as GPO Management will think the templates are \u201cmissing\u201d.<\/p>\n

Not a hard thing to fix, thankfully, and already established GPO\u2019s aren\u2019t adversely affected BUT it is a real pain when you want to create new GPO\u2019s.<\/p>\n

And, actually, it points to something that bears some thought:\u00a0 it probably is a GOOD idea to create a Central Store if you are doing anything with GPO templates that is above and beyond the \u201cvanilla\u201d basics.\u00a0 That way you won\u2019t end up with issues caused by mismatched templates on your DC\u2019s.\u00a0 Definitely worth consideration!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a short post to highlight something I stumbled across the other day. One of our customers has been bought out by a much larger company and the new parent company is in the process of transitioning my customer\u2019s systems into the parent company\u2019s infrastructure.\u00a0 One of the parent company\u2019s sysadmins was working in … <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":1621,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[259,261,263],"tags":[288,318,406,594,595],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nActive Directory\u2013Where did my GPO templates go???? - Archive<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/regroove.ca\/archive\/2014\/07\/17\/active-directorywhere-did-my-gpo-templates-go\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Active Directory\u2013Where did my GPO templates go???? - Archive\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This is a short post to highlight something I stumbled across the other day. 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