SBS2008 + GPO for Mapped Drives

Rambo89 · 17 May 2011 at 16:34

Just looking for some insight if anyone can give me any, i do IT Support and manage servers/clients remotely, one of the clients runs SBS2008 along with Windows XP. They want mapped drives so they can always have the share showing when moving computers, ive created a new group policy and linked it to the SBSUsers OU in group policy management, ive set up the drive maps in the policy and installed the client side extension that is needed for Windows XP, problem is, the policy is applied on the server which shows that it does work and map the shared drive but on the XP machines it does not map the drives and when doing gpresult it does not show the GPO has been applied.

Ive not had much experience with SBS2008, this is my first job in IT since i finished uni and i didnt really touch much of the group policy side, i used to be able to map fine with 2000/2003 server with net use batch scripts but i couldn't get them working either im guessing because it changed slightly in 2008?

Googled this for ages and just want to know if anyone has any ideas that i could try?

ashrobbo · 17 May 2011 at 19:23

are these users also running a logon script? such as a remove all drives script? remove it from the profile tab on their user account in AD.

a logon script could be removing the work your doing with the GPP Drive mappings.

Rambo89 · 17 May 2011 at 21:47

Yeah theres no scripts running what so ever.

I'm going to double check tomorrow though, im thinking it might be something stupid like privileges.

nrh1703 · 17 May 2011 at 22:03

you can use gpresult when logged on to a client pc as a client user account OR run the group policy modeling wizard from GPMC to see if the GPO that has the drive mappings is actually applying to the users.

If the above shows the GPO isn't applied it may be that the policy [link] isn't enabled for the appropriate container, has a wmi filter preventing application or security filtering mans it isn't applied to the users in question.

lack of permissions to read the share will not prevent the mapping but will prevent browsing the share. I assume you've tried mapping the drive(s) in question manually as one of the users on a client machine.

event log (on clients) might also offer some help.

PR. · 17 May 2011 at 23:15

I take it you are using Group Policy Preferences section of the GPO?

Are you applying the preference to the computer or the user in the GPO? If you've applied it to the computer and it's attached to the User OU nothing will happen. Also are the XP machines up to date patch wise (beyond client side extensions)?

As others have said, run the GPresults in Group Policy Manager to check what the policies are doing, it should give a report on every object and whether it worked or not, and if not why.

Have you tried gpupdate /force on the client to make sure it's getting the latest GPO settings

ashrobbo · 17 May 2011 at 23:21

also check that you havent disabled the user part of the GPO, or the computer part whichever your applying to.

Rambo89 · 18 May 2011 at 13:04

Figured the problem out, some of the PC's in the company who wants the shared drives have incorrect DNS settings set on the network card, replaced those with the right DNS settings and shared drives all worked!

Should have checked the DNS first!