Why won't the old NT system policies work any more??

[Dave Niemeyer]

We have recently migrated from NT domain to 2003 active directory. Since
the early days of NT we've been using the old "system policies" and they
have worked fine for us. I was told that we could slowly wean ourselves off
of those system policies "after" going to AD and then get into group
policies. The first day after we went to AD (yesterday) I noticed that
NONE of the old system policies are working on anyone's computer anymore. I
need them to work so I can finish some other work, various reasons, and I'll
get into group policies soon.

Why isn't anyone's machine getting the old system policies? We originally
pointed all the machines to look for the update of the policy manually at
\\servername\public\policies\1.pol and that has always worked. (That
server is still an NT box, by the way...) Now they are all stuck with the
system policy registry settings they were with the day before we went to AD
and won't get any other update/policy. I checked that the path is still
accessible to everyone and it is.

One caveat: All users right now use a 2003 domain controller with AD to
authenticate, but the system policies are on another old NT server that
we're going to wipe out and load 2003 on soon. Does that difference in OS
explain why the clients won't look to that NT box after authenticating and
"told" to look for the policies?

Any ideas?

Would greatly appreciate the help.

Dave Niemeyer
(remove "nospam" if replying directly)

 

[Jdrew [MS]]

Hey Dave,

Once a computer account is moved into a Windows 2000 or higher domain, it
no longer looks for or uses System policies, but only group policies. The
only around that is to either move the computer accounts back to the NT4
domain or else create a group policy with the same settings to apply.
There is a tool Gpolmig.exe you can try to help migrate the System Policies
into a group policy, but it is not guaranteed to work.

HOW TO: Use the Group Policy Migration Utility to Migrate Windows NT
WGID:358
ID: 317367.KB.EN-US

I hope this helps!

Jim

 

[Dave Niemeyer]

Thanks for the answer, I figured that was true the more I looked into it. I
think I'll just have to get up to snuff with group policies on a crash
course...

Dave