Group policy defaults if the server is down

[Guest]

I will soon have 11-12 Win XP computers that run a specialized point-of-sale (POS) app for my restaurant and catering company. The server itself is a SCO Unix Openserver so the XP PC's will not need to communicate with one another---only the POS server.

I'm considering also adding a Win 2003 server to the mix, primarily to receive the benefits that are offered in the managment of the XP boxes via the Group Policy Management Console. However, uptime is important and I don't want my XP boxes dependent on the Win 2003 server to communicate with Unix server.

What happens if the Win 2003 server is down? Will the XP boxes still operate and allow my staff to run the POS apps? If so, what's happens in terms of the restrictions available via the GPMC? Do the individual XP PC's use their local machine/user policies?

Thanks,

Jeffrey Mount

 

[Luke]

Hi Jeffrey,
If your win 2003 server went down it should not prevent the
clients from being able to access the SCO unix server. However you may
in order to guarentee communication (to the SCO unix server without the
win 03 server) you may have to add the IP address of the UNIX server to
the clients hosts file to ensure that they could resolve the IP address
of the UNIX server without needing the DNS on the win 2003 server. If
the server was down then the clients would use the cached group policy
because when the server is a up a local copy would be stored of the
domain GP on all of the clients. Therefore if the clients could not
access the win 2003 server's GP then the clients would simply use the
latest version cached on the local client.
Hope this helps, Luke.

 

[Guest]

Luke,

It makes great sense. I do have a follow-up: is the local cache cleared when the XP box is shut down? We usually turn off all our PC's in the evening. Of course, the Win 2003 server would run 24x7. However, if for some reason it went down and an XP box hadn't been powered up, what group policy would the XP use then?

Thanks,

Jeffrey

 

[Luke]

Hi Jeffrey,
When the clients shut down they would not loose the cached
domain policy. It is cached to the hard drive. If the clients were
powered up without the win03 server then they would simply used the
latest cached domain policy.

Luke.