Normally when you first log on, Windows makes a few folders under your user document folder for things such as Music, Favourites, Downloads etc. On a standalone machine these are usually stored under your user profile folder (C:\Users\{username}\Downloads in Win 7 for example) but they can be moved when you’re on a network.

In Group Policy, expand User Configuration > Policies > Windows Settings > Folder Redirection. Right click on one of the folders listed and select “Properties”. Documents is a good place to start, as I’ll show you how all the others can hang off that.

If you’ve worked with group policy before I won’t insult your intelligence more by explaining everything in here, suffice to say that in our environment, I’ve chosen to use the settings as shown below:

Settings for redirecting My Documents to a shared network location.

For all the other folders I redirect, I use the same settings on the right there, and only change the Target folder location property on the left.

What this does is specify that you want all the users folders redirected to what you’ve specified in the Home folder property for the user in Active Directory (usually H: somewhere on your network). This is I suspect how most admins configure their document folders. The issue comes with the other folders later on. Lets work with the Desktop folder for example.

To redirect the Desktop, you again access the properties of that folder. This time, you’ll notice you lose the option to “Redirect to the user’s home folder”. This is fair enough, as we don’t want every folder type pointing to the same location. Unfortunately though, Microsoft don’t offer a simple way to redirect to a subfolder of the new Documents location, although they do suggest this:

The %USERNAME% variable may be used as part of the redirection path, thus allowing the system to dynamically create a newly redirected folder for each user to whom the policy object applies.

Folder Redirection feature in Windows KB Article.

What they are suggesting is using \\server\share\%USERNAME%\Desktop to specify the location, but what if your AD structure is more complicated than that? For instance, we have our year levels separated into folders to make it easy for teachers to locate a certain kid’s work. There just isn’t a variable to insert a specific folder into this path based on the user’s location or position in AD — ie. you can’t use \\server\share\%groupfolder%\%username%\Desktop as it just doesn’t exist.

The next logical step was to try inserting the mapped drive into this field: “H:\Desktop”. The problem here was that at the point that the logon process connects to the desktop, the H: has not yet been mapped, leaving a blank desktop and an error in the Application log. It was at this point a few years ago I gave up. Until this week.

Lucky for us!

When you view the GP report for Folder Redirection you’ll notice that MS includes the %VARIABLES% that it uses to fill in the user’s home folder path (as shown):

AH! Variables!

In my initial tests, I set the Target folder location to “Redirect to the following location”, and the Root Path: to “%HOMESHARE%%HOMEPATH%\Desktop”. This did NOT work. I can’t remember the error exactly, and I think it may not have even mapped at all.

My next test was to try with “%HOMESHARE%\Desktop” and lo-and-behold, it worked! Now when a user logs in they get a H Drive, and a desktop that routes to a folder in that drive, regardless of the path the user data is in. If they inadvertently save something to their desktop it will be securely tucked in their home drive where they can find it again later, or on their desktop the next time they log in.

Going through the rest of the folders in Folder Redirection I did the same (except for the Start Menu, although I suspect this will work exactly the same way). Now all my data is secure in my home drive, without using true roaming profiles (which can end up pulling a lot of data around the network in a school environment).

Some caveats

Even after multiple iterations and rewrites, Adobe software still cannot handle expanded network paths for saving application data. If you redirect AppData to “%HOMESHARE%\AppData” even something as new as Adobe Photoshop CS4 refuses to load. The only solution I have found for this is to use “H:\AppData” or nothing at all for that folder. This seems to work acceptably for the AppData folder, even though it doesn’t for the Desktop.

Also! I haven’t actually tested this extensively in a production environment (although it works day-to-day on a couple of test desktops), so test this with your apps and bits before making these changes wholesale to your network.

I’ve also found while writing this post that this information is included in part in Microsoft’s Managing Roaming User Data Deployment Guide.doc found here. As I wasn’t using roaming profiles I didn’t read it. Plus it’s unclear as to the best way to redirect and I still would have written this post to clear it up for you.

I hope this tip can help you get Folder Redirection working for you if your environment is a bit unusual. Let me know what you find!

I can’t think of a way they can possibly top this clip. Brilliantly shot in High Def, beautifully choreographed, and perfectly synchronised. If you liked their treadmill clip (symbolically shattered half way through) you’ll love how clever this is. It also knowingly nods to the Internet and Youtube crowd (did I see the mars rover? Something like the water bird that Homer uses to press the “any” key when he works from home? An OK Go concert rendered in Lego?).

What a joyful and exciting clip from a band that knows how to engage their audience. Bravo!

I’ve been sorting through our group policies and rewriting them ready for a switch over to Windows 7. During my thorough investigation it turns out our current policies overlap a fair bit, and it’s no wonder we have trouble tracking down why something we’re sure we’ve set in GP turns up unset on logon.

So my big project has been going through our settings one by one, and deciding which of these categories they fall into:

1. Common Computer settings — all the computers should get these as they are vital to the function of the network, or are likely to break something if they aren’t explicitly set for our staff and students.
2. Common User settings — everything else that just can’t be set in the Computer policy.
3. Staff Settings
4. Student Settings
5. Printers

The interesting trick I’ve learned about the printer GPs though is how to apply printers based on the computer’s OU without using local loopback!

The Problem

The problem with managing printers in a school environment is that unlike corporations (which GP is clearly geared towards) people move around all the time but want to be connected to both their printers in their offices on the other side of the school, but also the local printer in the classroom they’re in. Microsoft decided that without any extra tricks they would let you set a default printer for a user, but not for a room because Betty from HR will only ever use the one computer in her office.

The Old Trick

Then they told people you could get around this by enabling local loopback, which applies both computer and user policies to a user, so you could set the printer as default in a computer policy using the “user” section, then make the computer read the computer section at logon and apply the printer. The problem with this is that it could slow down your logins, as it increases the number of policies it has to read and evaluate to prepare the desktop.

The New Way

In my quest to eliminate unnecessary policies, I wanted to kill local-loopback too. A bit of research turned up this page on using GP Preferences to assign default printers, which I already knew and was using, but it advocated using local-loopback.

But

Further down that page was a comment by Michael Moore who had this bit of advice:

Actually, if you Item Level target a group which has a computer in it, it will still install the printer even though these preferences are under the User Configuration Section of the GPO.

Try it, saved on loopback.

Michael Moore

So I followed the directions on that site (it has helpful screenshots) to create a printer policy and target specific computer OUs, but then instead of turning on local-loopback, I simply ticked Run in logged-on user’s security context (user policy option).

Now my printers deploy and are set as default based on the current computer’s OU without using local-loopback at all.

Eager to dig up dirt on Julia Gillard (an alumna of Unley High School) the SMH visited the Unley High website and clicked on through to the Old Scholars page. HAHA! they yell, chuckling to themselves:

… it appears the website of the federal Education Minister’s former school, Unley High, has fallen victim to hackers. No doubt coincidentally, those curious to learn more about the Deputy PM’s school days in South Australia by clicking on the “old scholars” tab are confronted with an advertisement for “free black nude pictures”.

via A big night for Barnaby Joyce.

Of course, the site has not been “hacked” in any way. In setting the site up, I thought it a fun experiment to give the Old Scholars a way to re-connect, and create mini sites of their own within the pages of the Unley site. The hope was that they might create groups for the chess club of ’94, or the lazy boys of the class of ’67, or whatever. Then they could write messages on each other’s pages, write reminiscences of the times they had, and generally use the site in any way they saw fit to reconnect and share with one another. I installed the excellent open-source software Elgg, and enabled a feature called “blogs” (short for “web logs”) so people could fill the pages of the site with all their memories. I had hoped it would be a long-lasting record that would share some of Unley’s rich history.

Till the spammers got hold. Elgg is a well-known piece of software, so spammers have written scripts that scour the web for open installations of Elgg (such as ours is), automatically create user accounts, and start writing blog posts promoting their spammy sites. What they are doing is taking advantage of sites that are open to the public, and is so far from hacking it’s ludicrous. It’s no different from me creating a pretend Facebook account called “Spammy McSpams” and posting links to porn from there.

The Old Scholars site has the ability for legit users to flag such stuff, and I’ve tried to make it as obvious as possible. My only problem was presuming people would make use of such features when given. To prevent such “hacking” in future, I’ve disabled the blog feature, as no one was using it except the spammers. I’ve also cleaned the site up, so horny journos will need to find some other source of black nudes.

Just wanted to clear that up.

I’ll be purchasing Caravan Palace ASAP. I’ve found a group that embodies the music I love. Apparently it’s called Electro Swing. I haven’t heard a single one I haven’t liked yet.

Such a missed opportunity. Instead they announced some sort of e-reader thing.

There’s this new craze on Twitter to get people to ask you questions anonymously and answer them on Twitter or your website. It uses this little site (run by FormSpring.com) called formspring.me to solicit questions, and people derive some amusement from it.

BUT

The day I heard about it, I thought immedaitely of skribit.com which I had only JUST installed on my site a week earlier and does exactly what formspring.me does only prettier, usefull-er and integrated-into-your-site-ier which for me are all important things.

See that little blue tab over there -> ??

That’s the Skribit tab. It says “Suggestions”, but if you hover over it, it says Skribit too! Click it. I dare you. I’ll wait. You can come back by clicking the little (x) in the top right… Go on…

See that form? It lets you ask questions, just like Formspring. It even lets you do it anonimously, just like Formspring. Unlike Formspring, Skribit lets you add tags, follow questions until they’re turned into posts, and generally interract more with the person you’re asking. But it’s not just for anonymous questions. Paul Stamatiou (one of the creators) has been using it on his site since he started building it, and his readers suggest posts then vote on the topics that they want to see him write about, which was the whole reason he made it in the first place. It’s all about curing Writers Block, which I own up to having about 99% of the time.

Well Skribit launched at the end of last year! They’ve been open for business for a while now, but they’re pushing to get the word out for twenty-ten, and I had to write a post about it so I could tick that off my Skribit to-do list. So if you’re already using Formspring.me (bleh) or just want some feedback from your readers in a way that makes you accountable and helps you keep track of it then you should probably go install it. It keeps out of the way, and it’s kinda pretty. It’s easy to install (there’s a Skribit widget for Wordpress too) and integrates with Twitter and Facebook so your lazy readers don’t even have to log in! If you’re interested try the tour to get a feel for it (or just test it out here), or read about the people who made it

And to my reader(s) you can leave me suggestions on what you’d like me to write about, or ask anonymous questions, just like all the cool kids are doing! Try it!

Of course this post’s disparaging remarks against formspring were not endorsed or condoned by Skribit.

When I find music that I like I can’t let it go until I share it. This is one of those tracks.

Buy Artichaut on iTunes or on Amazon.

I don’t want a separate app where I have to gather all my friends and influencers in one place all over again — I have that in Twitter.

What I want from you is a way to flag a user (secretly) as someone whose opinion has aligned with mine in the past, so that when they say “I love this new movie”, I’ll be reasonably certain that I will too. And if I could flag someone’s opinion as wrong((that’s what we’re all thinking right?)) most of the time, then I will know that when they say “I love this song”, not to bother clicking through to it. It might mean that some of the users in my stream have slightly darker or lighter updates so I can tell at a glance which ones I’ve flagged as trustworthy or mostly wrong.

Heck, just being able to easily see that someone is in a “trusted” private Twitter list with a glance at my main stream would be double handy. Do that.

Thank you for listening. If you do this, you will win the world.

PS. to all the people I follow: I’m not talking about any of you. I think all of you have fantastic taste. It’s those other people I worry about…

Had a major assignment and a test since last time I updated, so I thought it might be time to report how they went.

I was happy with my assignment and my grade of Satisfactory, until I realised I could have gotten Outstanding! Apparently my only mistake was to not:

Keep the instance variable on the same line as its label.

Eg in my toString class I put:

Instead of:

Obvious, but worth marking me down? Maybe I did something else wrong, but I don’t think so.

I also attempted the test which included a section on Arrays. I haven’t done any study on arrays. I was worried. But the test was open book, so I learned what I needed as I went, and even had time to attempt the merit. My result?

That’s better!

So I’m pretty happy with that.

Now on to Polymorphism and Interfaces!