January 2015 – Mark Gilbert's Tech Blog

Group Policy Preferences For Different Versions Of Internet Explorer In the Same Policy

So, you’re managing a Windows estate and you’re in the process of updating Internet Explorer versions that you’ve managed via Group Policy. At some point you’re going to have multiple versions of Internet Explorer out in the wild and need to manage the settings for them both. As you should know by now, Internet Explorer maintenance settings have been deprecated in favour of Group Policy preferences.

The first thing to note is that even if you download the Group Policy templates for IE11 and install them correctly, you wont see an option for IE11, just IE10 and earlier.

IE Group Policy

Not to worry though, IE10 settings will apply just fine to IE11 and that is the desired behaviour. So, now you know how to configure settings for IE11, you might wonder how preferences for different versions of IE in the same policy would interact on the client machine. Well in the setup I looked at this had previously been done using item level targeting, which is in the common tab of the policy;

IE Item Level Targeting

The targeting was looking into the registry and checking for specific version strings which would only have the policy apply where the registry strings matched what was being checked;

IE Item Level Targeting Registry Setting

Now, while the above method would work it’s unnecessary. When you create a new setting within the policy, you’ll see some Item-level targeting is already put in place by Microsoft to ensure the settings only get applied to the right version IE on the client. The version of the IExplore.exe process running on the client machine is checked and then that is used to determine which IE settings to deploy from the GPO. So in my environment, as you can see below the settings would only apply to specific IE versions;

IE Version Filters

The XML file already contains all it needs to look for specific versions of IE, and as a result the various policies can co-exist with each other.

In short, the item level targeting is done for you, no need to add any more targeting unless you need to filter things down further.

Unable to connect via RDP to a Server 2003 R2 server

I came across a problem today with a rather aged Server 2003 R2 server. I rebooted it as part of some troubleshooting, and after the reboot found I was unable to connect to the server via RDP. So, I jumped on the VM console to check various things, the Terminal Services service was started, but I did force a stop of this and start it again. Checked over the registry to ensure the listening port hadn’t been changed for any reason. Checked the terminal services configuration to ensure the connection wasn’t disabled and there were no strange limits imposed on the connection, but all looked normal. I did try disabling and re-enabling the connection, but still no luck. When I did a netstat -ao and looked for anything listening on 3389, there was nothing at all listening, no Terminal Services or any conflicting service was listening on port 3389.

In the end, after a bit of a search on Google and a bit of checking, one suggestion mentioned was to re-register the Terminal Services DLL. So using the following command regsvr32 remotepg.dll I tried this and the registration failed. Tried to un-register it first with regsvr32 /u remotepg.dll but again this failed. So, I came to the conclusion there might be a problem with the DLL. So, I copied the DLL from another working machine, un-registered and re-registered the DLL again, which succeeded this time round. Then after a reboot, I was hopeful, but still no joy. Final, checking the Terminal Services configuration again I noticed that now the connection was disabled, right clicking and going to All Tasks and enabling the connection, I was then able to connect via RDP. Success

WordPress Permalinks & mod_rewrite in lighttpd

After switching to lighttpd away from Apache I was pretty pleased with the whole process, everything seemed to be working fine, with the exception of my permalink structure. Bad news, however this can be fixed;

In your lighttpd.conf or 10-rewrite.conf enable mod_rewrite and paste the following code (you will obviously need to edit the $HTTP[“host”] portion):

$HTTP["host"] =~ "www.mark-gilbert.co.uk" {
url.rewrite-final = (
# Exclude common directories
"^/(wp-admin|wp-includes|wp-content)/(.*)" => "$0",
# Exclude root php files
"^/(.*.php)" => "$0",
# Handle permalinks and feeds
"^/(.*)$" => "/index.php/$1"
)
}

These three rules should cover every plugin and bit of functionality within the system. If you have other folders which you will need to access without any redirection (images in a separate folder etc), you have to add these names to the first rule, separated by the | characters.

Now go to Settings-> Permalinks, change Common Settings to Custom Structure and enter what you wish it to look like.

Basically, once mod_rewrite is enabled on the lighttpd server, which is done by adding the following line to the lighttpd.conf file;

server.modules += ("mod_rewrite")

This should work for you too.

OnePlus One SMS Message Centre Settings Location

Today I found I needed to check my SMS message centre settings on my OnePlus One, but wasn’t able to find the option anywhere in the standard settings.

The solution was to use the phone dialer, enter *#*#4636#*#* and then this takes you through to a testing information screen with various information menus. Under the “Phone Info” menu, down the bottom of the page, you should see the SMS Message Centre options, labelled “SMSC”.

From here you can update the settings and refresh them if you ever have any issues sending SMS messages. Obviously the specific number to enter will depend on your mobile operator.