Virtually Jason

Every now and then (especially in a VDI situation), I need to enable Group Policy Loopback Processing.  This Group Policy setting can do a lot of things; I usually use it to allow me to create Group Policy Objects that contain User Configuration settings that only apply when the users log into a certain subset of computers (such as my VDI desktops).  When that setting is enabled, it basically instructs windows to process its computer GPOs again at user logon, so as to catch any User Configurations that are specified. This is a setting that I configure once for each VDI deployment that I do, and I always need to look up where it is (who bothers to memorize where specific settings are amongst the thousands of options!?).  No problem, that's literally what google was made for.  So, a quick search for Group Policy Loopback Processing is in order, which brings me to a technet article about Windows Server 2003  that calls the setting simply Loopback processing . ...

I've been migrating some large file servers from a customer's environment into a service provider's cloud.  Instead of just transferring the VMs (which would literally take weeks in some cases), we've provisioned new VMs and are replicating the data.  Then, during an outage window, we do a differential copy, shut down the old server and give the old server's name to the new server.  This also has the benefit of allowing us to get all of those older file servers up on Windows 2012 R2, so it's a win-win.  Well, mostly. One of these file servers has some very strict NTFS permissions due to the presence of sensitive data.  In this case, the only permissions on the folder were a Full Control for the Domain Admins and a Full Control for the group who owns the data (we'll call them the Finance Department).  We used good old Robocopy  (taking advantage of the new /MT switch to multithread it for added performance!) to copy the data and all permissions from t...