Many administrators are always looking for easier ways to deploy applications across their network. I find it amazing the number of times I have spoken with other Windows Admins, and they have never used the package deployment features of group policy.

It works well, and I am going to walk you through a simple application deployment.

Start out by getting on your domain controller. Open up Active directory Users and Computers.

Determine what computers will get the package. You could send it out to the entire domain, or you could put a group of computers in an Organizational Unit and only push it out to them.

In our little example here I will push it out to the entire domain. We need to right click on on the domain, and go to properties. The properties window will popup and then we move over to the group policy tab.

Click on edit.

Drill down to computer configuration, then Software Settings, and then Software installation

Now before we continue, we need to think about where our installation package will be located. You need to put it on a public share that all computers under the group policy can get to.

For this test run I created a simple share that had read access for all users and put it on the domain controller.

The second point is all deployed packages must be MSI files*. If the application you want to deploy does not have a MSI installer, then it cannot be pushed out via group policy (There are still ways to do this…but that is another article)

In the past, this requirement limited GPO application pushes to only MS products like Office, but these days many vendors include a MSI file with their setup.

So we copy the MSI file to the public share, and now we can get back to setting up our package.

Right click on the “Software Installation” option and go to New, and then package.

It will now prompt you to select the MSI installer. Make sure you select it via the public share you have created, not via the local file folders. This is because Windows will use this exact path when pushing out to the machines.

Once you have selected a MSI file it will ask you if you want to pick the “Assigned”, or the “Advanced” application deployment. For most cases you can simply pick the “Assigned” deployment.

That is all there is to it. Your package is sitting in the group policy

Now, any machine that falls under that group policy will silently receive the package.

*GPO also supports MST, and MSP files

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• Features of the Windows Vista hard disk defragmentation utility
  Microsoft releases a Knowledge Base article describing the features of Vista’s Disk Defragmentation utility.
  (tags: Defragment )

This tips explains how to set up Tor in Feisty based on my own experience (with Gnome interface). Tor is a program that allows one to surf through a local proxy with a routed IP address (so the webpage you surf does not have a record of your own IP address). I got it work in Firefox2, so this tutorial will mainly be for Firefox users (if you use Firefox 1.5 or under, you need to install Privoxy in addition to the two steps below).

Installing Tor in Ubuntu Feisty

We will be using apt-get command to install Tor. However, the Tor copy in Ubuntu universe didn’t work for me. I had to use the one from noreply.org. To do so, do in the terminal (more…)

Firefox, firefox2, firefox browser, foxyproxy, gnome interface, gpg fingerprint, Internet, ip address, keyserver, Linux, mozilla, privoxy, proxy, sudo, terminal type, ubuntu, ubuntu feisty, Web

The System tool in Control Panel uses currentspeed to do its reporting rather than maxspeed, but the System tool may display the wrong clock speed for the Central Processing Unit (CPU).

As of January 2002, Windows XP uses the currentspeed value rather than the maxspeed value because the maxspeed value was reporting inconsistent values.

After startup, the processor may not correctly reflect its correct speed until a program utilizes processor cycles.

The computer basic input/output system (BIOS) in some laptop computers may throttle the processor because of heat, load, power AC/DC. (more…)

basic input output system, central processing unit cpu, computer, computer basic, control panel, correct processor, correct speed, Hardware, laptop computers, maxspeed, power ac, processor speed, system properties, system tool, system tools, Windows, xp

Following our coverage of the Windows XP SP3 beta leak almost a month ago in August, here’s some more info on the official beta, which just had its first authorized distributable released earlier today. Say hello to Windows XP SP3, build 3205!

While the newly-released build and the one leaked a month ago (Build 3180) may share the same name, we can exclusively reveal that they are not identical releases. This release, also shipped as windowsxp-kb936929-sp3-x86-enu.exe, is 334.2 megabytes and has been made available to tier-one Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 beta testers. Hashes are as follows:

CRC: 56e08837
MD5: c8c24ec004332198c47b9ac2b3d400f7

Along with the standalone installer redistributables (in English, Japanese, and German), Microsoft also provided the usual release notes and a list of all the hotfixes included in this release. Contrary to popular belief, Windows XP SP3 does ship with all-new features - not just patches and hotfixes, most of them backported from Windows Vista: