Troubleshooting Group Policy

This section discusses the following problems that you may encounter while using Group Policy with Enterprise Library:

• An administrator enters invalid values.
• An application is modified without generating a new Group Policy template.
• Overrides result in an invalid configuration.
• Other errors.

The next sections describe each of these.

Administrator Enters Invalid Values

Group Policy administrative tools, such as the Group Policy Editor and the Group Policy Management Console, do not perform custom validations, so they will allow an administrator to enter an invalid value in a string field, such as an incorrect type name.

Only policies having valid values on all settings are applied, so when an invalid value is detected, an entry is written to the event log and the entire policy is ignored. The problem is logged to the event log.

Application Is Modified Without Generating New Group Policy Template

If the application is modified, some configuration elements may be replaced with new elements that have the same names, but different types. In this case, the manageable configuration source will look for the policies of the new element, but it will find policy settings for the original configuration elements, which may not match. Typically, this will result in missing values.

Policies Conflict to Produce Invalid Configuration

It is possible for different policies to conflict with one another. If this is the case, it will result in an invalid configuration after the Group Policy overrides are applied. This type of problem can easily occur, because different polices may be applied in different Group Policy Objects. In this case, the ManageableConfigurationSource instance does not detect an error. Typically, the consumer of the configuration settings logs the error.

Other Errors

An entry is written to the event log every time an error is detected, unless the application does not have the permissions required to write to the event log. In this case, no information about the error is available.