Deploying Files with Group Policy - Help Needed

Question

Hi,
I am trying to use group policy to deploy files and folders to our server estate. The policy I have created first creates a folder on each server's C drive and then coppies a set of files to this folder from a network share. The folder creation works fine
but the files copy fails. In the Application logs on the servers it displays the following error:
The computer 'ILMT' preference item in the 'GPO - Servers_Production_ALL {CC026B58-FA3B-4399-AA00-AE8E844B2B47}' Group Policy object did not apply because it failed with error code '0x80070005 Access is denied.' This error was suppressed.
Can anyone advise what exactly does not have access here? I don't know what I need to enable to get this to work.
Can anyone help?
Many thanks
James

Answer 1

The copy is on a file server share. presumably if I just give everybody read access to the share that would suffice?
No it won't.
"Sharing" requires several actions:
a) create the folder
b) share the folder
c) grant NTFS permissions on the folder
I think you've neglected action (c).
For your scenario, you need to grant the "server computers" read permissions to the folder.
You can add individual computer accounts, or a group, or "domain computers".
(In a similar way, you could grant access to a user, a group, or "domain users")
[if you need everybody (users) *AND* everything (computers), you could grant permissions to "authenticated users" since that principal includes *BOTH* users and also computers]
Note that "domain computers" and "authenticated users" include all types of domain member computers, i.e. servers, workstations, etc.
Also, note that granting a "computer account" access to a folder or share, does *NOT* mean that a user account on that computer can access the remote share, i.e. permission is granted to the computer account, and a logged-in user account on
that computer does not inherit any kind of access to the remote share by virtue of being logged in.
This means that the computer can access the share but the user cannot access the share. Because the computer account is an identity/principal of it's own accord.
[None of which really has anything to do with Group Policy at all - it's how Windows does file sharing and ACLs... ;)
Don
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