GPO and WMI Filters

WMI Filters and GPOs are powerful when used in combination (though evaluating MWI filters may slow down policy processing). Just a few quick examples:

For settings that may need to be applied to workstations, but not servers one could go with something like this -

WMI queries for workstations vs. servers

SELECT * FROM Win32_OperatingSystem WHERE (ProductType <> "2") AND (ProductType <> "3")     - workstations
SELECT * FROM Win32_OperatingSystem WHERE ProductType = "1"     - workstations

ProductType 1 = Desktop OS
ProductType 2 = Server OS – Domain Controller
ProductType 3 = Server OS – Not a Domain Controller

For things like Bitlocker policy that needs to be applied to laptops only one could go with something like this -

WMI queries for laptops vs. desktops
SELECT * FROM Win32_Battery WHERE (BatteryStatus <> 0)     - presence of a battery indicates laptop
SELECT * FROM Win32_PhysicalMemory WHERE (FormFactor = 12)     - SODIMM memory indicates laptop

If you want a quick test for certain WMI values on a computer – use WMI command line tool (wmic) -

Here are some helpful links -

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Updating computer's AD Security Group membership without rebooting

I found the following to be very useful - From the elevated command prompt execute “ klist –li 0x3e7 ” to view the logon session of the computer account . To purge them, simply execute “ klist –li 0x3e7 purge ”. A typical use case might involve targeting GPOs based on computer's group membership. When you add computer to the group in order to test the application of policies you can reboot it or, alternatively, run the above mentioned to clear logon sessions, then do “ gpupdate /force ” and check. In a spirit of giving credit where credit is due, I found a few references to this, but the one I learned it from was http://setspn.blogspot.com/2010/10/updating-servers-security-group.html

WordPress displays weird characters

Sometimes after a database conversion (e.g. from MySQL to MariaDB) or due to encoding issues a situation might arise when WordPress is showing weird characters. A quick way of remedying the situation would involve examining the pages to discover a pattern (what characters are being substituted, in the example below the apostrophe was replaced by â€™ ) then running an queries against the database to reverse the effect. Here's a quick example (common tables that store content): UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content, 'Â' , '' ) UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE (post_content, 'â€™' , "'" ) UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = REPLACE (meta_value, 'Â' , '' ) UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = REPLACE (me...

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