A chapter on Group Policy troubleshooting? Am I implying that things can go wrong during the processing of Group Policy Objects? Am I insinuating that Group Policy administrators may not be perfectly planning out every single setting that they put inside every single GPO? How insulting to both Microsoft and to you admins!

Alas, nothing and nobody is perfect. Even in the smallest of environments, if you use Group Policy to deploy settings, you will eventually need to troubleshoot some aspect of this process. Most of the time, Group Policy issues are caused by human error. It is very easy to deploy settings to the wrong workstations or users, or forget to set filtering, or link something before you have fully tested it. It is also easy to create conflicting settings packages, or to deny permissions and forget about them, only to cause you grief down the road. There aren't many checks and balances inside the Group Policy mechanism; the technology trusts you as the administrator to know what you are doing, and to do it properly. It will allow you to shoot yourself in the foot, and it will take down your entire network if you tell it to do so. When things go south, we need to know where to start and what tools are available to us for tracking down problems inside the Group Policy engine.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Troubleshooting tools and procedures
• GPO version numbers
• Checking the replication status via GPMC
• Detecting slow links
• The trouble with FRS
• Group Policy results wizard
• Group Policy modeling