Windows Tip: Remotely forcing group policy refresh

June 16, 2006 —

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One of the cardinal principles of managing enterprise networks is avoiding having to touch desktop computers unless you really must. Of course, by "touching" a desktop what I mean is having to walk over to where that machine is located and log on interactively to perform some administrative task.

One such task that usually requires touching a desktop is forcing a Group Policy refresh on that desktop. Normally you must log on locally to the desktop computer and open a command prompt and type gpupdate /force to accomplish this. Fortunately, by using a free tool from Sysinternals you can perform this task from a single, central location and save yourself the exercise.

Here's how you do this. First, download psexec from Sysinternals and save it somewhere in the system path on your domain controller or administrator workstation. Psexec is a lightweight telnet substitute that can be used to launch processes on remote Windows computers. Once you've downloaded psexec, open a command prompt and type psexec \\computer cmd where computer is the name or IP address of the remote desktop computer you are targeting. Once you've done this, you are now looking at an interactive command prompt on the remote computer, and any command (like gpupdate /force) you now type will be executed on the remote machine instead of the local one.

One final thought: it goes without saying that if your enterprise has thousands of desktop computers, then any task that requires having you "touch" each of those desktops is going to mean a heck of a lot of walking. But with roughly 1 in 4 adults being obese nowadays (and the figure is probably higher for sedentary IT professionals) then maybe this kind of walking might be just what you need! I certainly know it's what I need -- my wife tells me so repeatedly!

ITworld.com