Managing The Windows 2000 Registry

Picking the Right Policies

Which policies are appropriate for you? It depends on how your network’s built, who uses it, and what they should--and shouldn’t--be able to do. As you can tell from the preceding tables, the built-in policy templates offer a pretty wide range of capabilities, and you can roll your own templates to give you centralized control over almost anything whose behavior is controlled by Registry entries.

The following sections suggest which policies might be appropriate for various situations; you can pick and choose to build a set of policies that’s right for you.

Policies for Anybody

Most administrators who use policies do so to prevent users from doing things they shouldn’t. First on the list is probably preventing users from running unapproved applications, which you can do with the “Run only approved Windows applications” and “Remove Run command from Start menu” policies. In addition, you might want to consider using the floplock program from the Resource Kit to prevent user access to the floppy drives.

Most administrators hate to spend time fixing things like display resolution settings. Consequently, you may be interested in the Control Panel\Display policy category, since it allows you to prevent users from changing display settings.

Policies for a Lab Network

Many schools and universities have lab networks that students can use to do their classwork. Many companies have something similar: test labs, training classrooms, and so on. These environments share ...