group policy installation

[ladyrockstar]

Hi,  I have just set up our win2003  server to do the installation of Autograph 3.11 via group policy.  I have logged on as a user but nothing appears to be happening.  Any ideas? There are no error messages but it just doesn\'t happen.
Thanks

[Stephen_Whipp]

Hi

Without further information I cannot really advise you to the specifics of this problem, however I\'ll attempt to give you an overview of the common problems I and others have found.

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There can be several reasons why group policy information Fails. It unfortunately does not bring up an onscreen error message when it does.

Error information is available from the Event Viewer found in
Start->Programs->Administrative Tools

In order to get the best idea of what has happened then you need to view this both at the server and client side.

The two usual causes of failure are

1) The Client cannot access the share on the server. This usually results in a message on the client to the effect of
"The Installation Package was not found" or "The Installation Package was not accessible".

This will usually result in the target machine flashing "Installing Managed Software : Autograph 3" in the mini dialog as the computer starts up.

2) The Package has been applied to an organisation unit that does not contain the required workstation. This results in no log of the installation on the workstation because the server did not even try to apply it

The 1st case is problematic. According to documentation Registering the share on Active Directory should be enough to ensure that all stations can see it. This however does not always seem to be the case. This is also independent of the ability to see the share through a mapped network drive or in the network neighbourhood view. Thus although the share may seem to be available visibly to the station it is not such as far as the installation is concerned. I haven\'t found a reliable way of fixing this as yet. Usually a bit of playing around gets it to work.

The usual cause of the second case is an attempt to apply it to users rather than machines. Autograph does not currently successfully install on a per user basis. To fix this problem

1) Redeploy the package to a organisation unit which contains the computers than will require Autograph. E.g. The Maths Computer Lab group.

2) Restart each of the workstations (This sometimes needs to be done twice depending on configuration). It needs to restart not just log out and log in because a per machine installation occurs on Start Up i.e. before the login screen comes up

It should also be noted that Group Policy Installations are not expected to work for clients running:

NT 4 or below
Windows 9X
XP Home

This is a limitation of Active Directory. It demands that the station is part of a domain that can be referenced through DNS not WINS. XP Home is missing the required components to allow it to join a domain.

Hope this helps

Stephen Whipp