Group Policy question

I was hoping someone could help me understand something.
If I make a change in the group policy (gpedit.msc) on a windows xp pro machine that IS logged onto a domain. Will this make a change to this machine only or does is make a change to that user no matter which machine he/she logs onto?
Thanks in advance!

 

I think no one has responded to this because it is not an easy question to answer. There should be a hierarchy with either the local policy always over-riding a central policy, or the central policy always over-riding a local one. I did a google search which gave a lot of links to group policy editing, but on a quick perusal I could not see one that addressed this issue. A more thorough one may bring up a definitive answer.

So in lieu of a definitive answer: a pragmatic answer - if you want a group policy to follow a user or computer, set it centrally in the active directory. In fact, generally it is probably best to always set group policies centrally at the active directory.

If you find that there is something that has to be set locally, you'll have to experiment. I'd start by setting something obvious like the desktop wallpaper. Set a wallpaper locally in group policy, and then set it to a different wallpaper in AD and see which policy takes effect.

 

I've just had another look through those google results. These two articles:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...docs/en-us/startgpstandaloneenv.mspx?mfr=true

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316977

suggests to me that the local GPO is copied to the central system. Therefore, things are a little more complicated than I initially thought.

I think your best option (unless another poster has a better suggestion) is to have a look through the articles returned by the google search, then run a few tests for yourself.

 

Group policy on Local Machine

Hi. If you change the group policy for the local machine then this is just for that one machine. In a domain there is an order to the way that policies are applied. Local machine policy is applied first and then will be overwritten by domain policy upto the top domain group policy object. Of course this order can be changed by setting the inheritance settings in the GPO's and the way they override. If you want to apply a policy to an individual user so it follows them around i.e roaming then you need to put the user in thier own OU and then apply/create the policy to that OU.

Pete