Saturday, June 8, 2013

event id 4098 when applying printers via user group policy

After a reboot of my domain controller, I got a lot of event ID 4098 warnings in my appliucation event log as seen below.  I was getting several dozen errors per day - one for each printer.  My user GPO had been assigning printers for months with no problems, but after a reboot, this started coming up:

















I fixed this by editing the group policy.  Go into the group policy for each printer and go to the common tab.and check the option for "run in logged in user's security context" as show below:


Tuesday, June 4, 2013

putting text screen saver with specified text on all machines via group policy

A client asked me to put a text based screen saver on all domain computers.  I did this through Group Policy Management.

Creating the group policy to enable the screen saver was easy.  Interestingly, the personalization option did not exist on my Windows 2008 R1 SP 2 server, so I had to make the changes in on my Server 2012 DC.  The changes to initiate the screen saver were here:

user config> admin templates> control Panel/personalization

This was easy, but what it didn't do was set the text.  I found the best way to set the text was via forcing a registry change on each machine that I could push down via group policy (creating a .reg file that is applied on login).

I applied the registry change using the "easy way" as described here:
http://blogs.technet.com/b/askds/archive/2007/08/14/deploying-custom-registry-changes-through-group-policy.aspx

And then I created the .reg file more or less using these instructions: http://www.winhelponline.com/articles/11/1/Customizing-the-SSText3D-screensaver-before-applying-it-to-the-Logon-desktop.html

I made the changes on my own machine and exported the appropriate registry hive (not a single key - but the entire hive of:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Screensavers\ssText3d]

And that did it.