Nixadmins.net

For a large software deployment, most IT departments do not have the staff or time
to install the software on each machine individually. In this article, I will
show you how you can configure a Group Policy to install the software on each
machine automatically from a central point.

What is Group Policy?

Creating a Group Policy Object (GPO)

Editing Your GPO

Creating a Software Installation Package

Checking your Software Installation Policy

Further Reading

What is Group Policy?

Group Policy is a huge topic.
I don’t consider myself an expert by any means with Group Policy and I have
been working with it for a few years already. For the purpose of this article,
you need to understand that Group Policy is a feature available in Windows XP,
Server 2000 and 2003 that allows you apply policies to computers and users in
your network. A group policy may be applied Site-wide, Domain-wide, or
Organization Unit (OU)-wide. In this article, we will be applying a Group
Policy Object (GPO) to an OU that I have already created.

Creating a Group Policy Object (GPO)

Creating a GPO is simple. All
you need to do is select your Organization Unit (in our case), right click on
it and choose Properties. From the Properties window, click on the Group Policy
tab and click the ‘New’ button, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Creating a New GPO

Editing Your GPO

Editing your GPO is about as
easy as creating it. Note that you must be a member of the Administrators or
Domain Administrators group in order to edit a GPO. To edit your newly created
GPO, simply click the ‘Edit’ button.

Figure 2: Editing your GPO

Creating a Software Installation Package

Now that we have created our
GPO, we must define what goes in it. In this article, we will focus on creating
a Software Installation Package to make software deployment automated on
multiple clients.

Software Packages can be
Assigned or Published to either Computers or Users. You may use any combination
of the four, depending on your scenario. Let me give you a few examples:

• Assigned
  to Computer: you are deploying
  software to multiple clients and require the software to be installed on
  all of the computers in the OU.
• Assigned
  to Users: the Users in your OU
  require a special application to be installed on every computer that they
  log on to.
• Published
  to Computer: there is an upgrade
  (ie: Windows Media Player) that is optional to all computers in your OU
  and can be installed if the user on that computer wishes.
• Publish
  to User: if the users in your OU
  use multiple computers and you want them to have the option to have their
  software with them, they can install any published package on any computer
  they are on.

It is important to note that
only software that includes an MSI install package can be deployed via Group
Policy. If your software does not have an MSI installer, there are third-party
programs that will repackage your application into an MSI – I have yet to find
one I actually like and would recommend, though.

To create a new Software
Installation Package, you can navigate to the ‘Software Settings’ folder in
either the Computer Configuration or User Configuration, depending on your
deployment requirements. In our scenario, we will be publishing an application
to a user so under the User Configuration, we will click on ‘Software
Settings’. Next we right-click on ‘Software Installation’ and then ‘New’ and
‘Package’ on the menu

Let’s
face it, everybody makes mistakes. Some users delete files, others crash
systems. But it’s never you, the all-knowing Administrator’s fault, right? In
this series we will take a look at how to design the perfect backup strategy
for you and your company using Microsoft’s NTBackup. We will also touch on a
new feature for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 called Volume Shadow Copy
Service. Because mistakes happen.

In This Article

Backup Basics

Backup Types

Scheduling Your Backup

Further Reading

Backup Basics

There are a few terms that we
must cover before we dive into this article.

Archive Bit:
an attribute for each file that indicates whether or not it has been modified
since it was last backed up.

Figure 1: Checking the Archive Bit

Backup Set:
the term used to describe a given backup of your data.

Backup Types

In
order to make a well-educated decision about which backup type is best for you
and your company, we must first look over all of the different options. With
Microsoft’s NTBackup, we have 5 different backup options, as outlined in Figure 2.

Figure 2: Backup Types

A Normal
backup performs a complete backup of the systems. This can also include a System State
backup which allows you to return your computer to the exact condition in which
it was at the time of the backup. A normal backup will take the longest time
and take up the most storage space out of any of the different backup types.
Usually a Normal backup is done once a week
with a combination of other backup types.

Incremental backups backup
all of the files that you have selected that have their Archive Bit set. This
means that the file has been modified since the last backup was performed. It
is important to note that only Incremental backups, as well as Normal backups, clear the Archive Bit.

I usually think of an
Incremental backup as building a tower; you start at the first level and build
on it from there. An Incremental backup will take the shortest time to complete
and uses up the least room on your storage medium, but takes the longest to
restore. This is because each time an Incremental backup is performed, only the
files that have been modified since the last backup will be backed up. When you
restore the files, you must rebuild the tower, reinstating each backup file in
the order it was created.

Differential backups are
similar to Incremental backups but do not clear the Archive Bit. Because of
this, a Differential backup causes a snowball effect. Let’s take, for example,
a scenario where a Normal backup is done every
Saturday and a Differential backup is done every weekday, which is a pretty
common practice. Every Saturday all the files on the system would be backed up
and the Archive Bit is cleared. On Monday all of the files modified since
Saturday are backed up. On Tuesday, all of the files that were modified since
Saturday would be backed up again, including those found in Monday’s backup
set. This is beneficial because you only need to restore the most recent
Differential backup set and the Normal backup
set, saving a lot of time over Incremental backups.

Figure 3: Differential vs. Incremental Backups

Copy backups can be thought
of as an in between solution because they can be done at anytime without
interrupting any other scheduled backup. A Copy backup can be performed at any
time and may be handy if you are about to try some new software or configuration
and want to make sure that your data is safe.

Daily backups are rightly
described by their title; regardless of any other variable, all of the files
that have been modified in the last twenty four hours get backed up. Similar to
Copy backups, the Archive Bit is not cleared, so you may perform a Daily backup
in between other scheduled backups without interrupting them.

There are three popular
combinations of Backups types used. The schedules are as follows:
Option One:

• Saturday: Normal backup – with System State
  first Saturday of the month
• Sunday: Differential
• Monday: Incremental
• Tuesday: Differential
• Wednesday: Incremental
• Thursday: Differential
• Friday: Incremental

Option Two:

• Saturday: Normal backup – with System State
  first Saturday of the month
• Sunday: Differential
• Monday: Differential
• Tuesday: Differential
• Wednesday: Differential
• Thursday: Differential
• Friday: Differential

Option Three:

• Saturday: Normal backup – with System State
  first Saturday of the month
• Sunday: Incremental
• Monday: Incremental
• Tuesday: Incremental
• Wednesday: Incremental
• Thursday: Incremental
• Friday: Incremental

The option that suites you
and your company best will be determined by the time available to complete a
backup, as well as the storage available to you. On one extreme, if you have
only an hour or two to complete the backup, Option Three might be your only
choice. If you are short on disk space and have time to perform a Differential
backup each night, Option Two might be the best road to take. In the middle we
have Option One. It provides the best of both worlds.

Scheduling Your Backup

It is very important that you
only schedule or run backup in off-peak hours. Because of the high disk I/O
(Input/Output), the performance of your machine will drastically be reduced during
a backup. There are also issues with locked files, which can be illuminated
using Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). We’ll talk about VSS in Part II of this
article

In order to find when the
best time to backup your system is, you may want to create a log counter to
find a time when your server is the least busy. We’ll talk about this a little later on in our backup series.

Further Reading

- Dan
Home, Orin Thomas (2004)
"Chapter 7: Backing up Data." Managing and Maintaining a Microsoft
Windows Server 2003 Environment. Microsoft Press, pgs 7-1 to 7-45.

- Mitch Tulloch, Ingrid Tulloch (2002) "Archive
Attribute." Encyclopedia of Networking. Microsoft Press, pg 101.

A really funny story going back to when our great Linus Torvalds wasn’t
so great. The site also holds alot of information so I hope you take a
look around and not only rush trough this page.
http://liw.iki.fi/liw/texts/linux-anecdotes.html

Just to get atleast one post in here. To make multiple subfolders in BASH you can speed it up by typing the following
[code:1:27f44de4b0]
user@localhost#mkdir /home/user/{music,movies,downloads,documents}
[/code:1:27f44de4b0]
Speeds up the process. Not a great tip but it's the first one here.