When I started preparing for this chapter, many things about this topic were going through my head because there's a lot of things to cover in just one chapter. Group policies is a broad topic to discuss, and it's possible to even write a whole book about it. It will be challenging, but I will make sure that I cover a majority of it.
My council tax increased by 8% in April, 2019. It is a rule and whether I like it or not, I have to pay it every month. If not, I will have to face the consequences. This particular rule has a clear audience: it will only apply to houses under the Kingston council. We can consider Group Policy as an authority that executes a rule or set of rules against a clearly identified audience. This is similar to the council in my example.
It is impossible to describe the benefits of Active Directory (AD) without mentioning group policies. Group policies is one of the main reasons why AD is so important in infrastructure management. Group policies are a double-edged sword. They have lots of advantages as they help to manage various types of security, application, and system settings. But at the same time, if they have not been configured or used properly, according to best practices, it can cost you a lot in many ways. Group Policy troubleshooting is one of the most common types of support calls for IT helpdesks.
That said, in this chapter, we will cover the following topics:
- Benefits of group policies
- Understanding group policies and their capabilities
- Group Policy processing
- Group Policy inheritance
- Group Policy conflicts
- Group Policy filtering
- Loopback processing
- Guidelines for using group policies appropriately in the infrastructure