Active Directory, 3rd Edition

Debugging Group Policies

If at any point you need to debug group policies, there are couple of options you can use. The first is new to Windows Server 2003 and is called the Resultant Set of Policy, which some people may be familiar with if you've used tools like Full Armor's Fazam 2000. The Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) allows you to specify certain user, computer, group, and GPO criteria to determine what will be applied. Another option is to enable some extra logging that can help point out GPO processing problems.

Using the RSoP

The RSoP is a very powerful tool to help identify what GPO settings will be applied to a user or computer. Before RSoP, administrators were left to do their own estimates as to what GPOs took precedence and what settings were actually applied to users and computers. RSoP removes much of the guesswork with an easy-to-use wizard interface.

To start the RSoP wizard, open Active Directory Users and Computers and browse to the domain or Organizational Unit that contains the users you want to simulate. Right click on the container and select All Tasks → Resultant Set Of Policy (Planning). Figure 10-17 shows the initial screen.

You must first select a specific object DN of a user or computer, an Organizational Unit that contains users or computers, or a domain. After clicking Next, you will come to the Advanced Simulation Options screen where you can select whether to pretend you are over a slow network, whether to use loopback mode, and whether a specific ...