Monday, May 13, 2013

Why sorting alphabetically isn't always a good idea...

Hi there and then.

I just stumbled upon a little known change in the RSoP Results report in Windows 8. This report has undergone a number of changes, mentioned partially at http://blogs.technet.com/b/grouppolicy/archive/2012/11/28/group-policy-in-windows-server-2012-results-report-improvements.aspx

Although at first glance it sounds good, I have a severe problem with the little fact that someone at MS decided to list the GPOs "including sorting information by GPO" - that means, the applied GPOs are sorted alphabetically instead of the order in which they apply.

I wouldn't get upset about that if they included the processing order somewhere else in the RSoP report. But, guess what? They didn't...

This effectively breaks our ability to track down the exact processing order (inheritance, enforcement, loopback), and it immediately makes it impossible to do a showcase like the one I did in http://evilgpo.blogspot.de/2012/02/loopback-demystified.html

OMG!