Going Deep on Vista Group Policy

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February 19, 2007 (Computerworld) -- Just a few corrections on your treatment of network location awareness (NLA) as it relates to Group Policy (GP) in Vista (and Longhorn Server) ["Longhorn Server Revealed: Group Policy Enhancements," Computerworld.com, Jan. 12]. First off, in pre-Vista, the issue is that slow link detection uses Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) to determine if a domain controller is available. This is actually a very fast process, but not very accurate, and if ICMP is blocked for any reason between client and domain controller, then all GP processing fails.

NLA improves on this by doing away with ICMP and using a more sophisticated algorithm for determining link speed between client and domain controller. In addition, NLA adds new refresh behavior to GP. Specifically, if a user or computer is not in contact with a domain controller during a normal GP refresh cycle, then the next time that NLA detects a domain controller, it will trigger a background GP refresh then and there. Note that the behavior described in the article for pre-Vista connecting via VPN and requiring a reboot to refresh policy is not correct (and wouldn’t really work, since during the reboot, the VPN would not be connected). What happens pre-Vista is that after the VPN is connected, background refresh of GP happens on the normal 90-minute schedule. The only thing NLA adds to that picture is that if, and only if, there has been a previous GP refresh failure and a domain controller then becomes available, then NLA will automatically trigger the background refresh rather than waiting for the background interval.

Darren Mar-Elia
CTO and founder
SDM Software Inc.
San Anselmo, Calif.



Editor’s note: The online article discussed in this letter was revised on Jan. 16, in part to reflect some of Mar-Elia’s comments.

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