Here is a screenshot of the Order 1 – Administrators (built-in). If an admin does do something abnormal and adds a user/group to the local administrators group, the next time Group Policy refreshes, their changes will be removed! If you’re thinking about service accounts etc, just hang in there, I’ll cover it! Especially the ones that have local access to your machines. The first time I reference a group in the GPP, I set it to delete all existing users and groups.

This is paramount when it comes to how I use this. Another thing that we’ll need to pay attention to use the Order.

If we used restricted groups, we’re forced to use only one entry as we saw in the Restricted Group section. The thing you probably notice is that there are 3 Administrators (built-in) entries. So there is nothing really complex about what you see here. Group Policy Preferences allow you to overwrite, add and control the users base on OU or other targeting items that apply to the computer. Using Group Policy Preferences (GPP) is a great way I’ve found to work in environments I’ve had to deal with. Now it’s time for a security audit and you have to report which machine has what users and groups. Period.Īnother issue is that anyone with local server access can log onto a machine and update the Local Administrators group as needed. The last GPO with a Restricted Group setting applied, wins. This is because they are not cumulative, meaning that they don’t add to the current list. The problem is when your AD and your infrastructure and GPOs start growing it becomes a juggling game and more difficult to control the order of Restricted groups.

Keep reading to see how you can solve some of them with Group Policy Preferences. This works, but has a few pitfalls as you’ve probably run into once in a while. There is a lovely security setting that has been around for many years, Restricted Groups, which can be controlled via local security policies of via GPO. One of the issues that data center or even any Windows Administrator has is managing the local administrators group on each and every one of their domain members.

No local users and groups windows 10