Erick Engelke, the System Manager of a 3600 workstation domain at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, created GPOtool.exe. The Using GPOtool page begins with:
NOTE: Click to download GPOtool.exe.
Introduction
GPOtool is a tool for testing and fixing GPO managed workstation software installs.GPOs are not 100% reliable when it comes to installing software. Depending on the size of the MSI and some other factors, some machines will have the software partially installed – and Windows will simply never attempt to reinstall. In effect, you are left with a software stump that is unusable, normally undeletable, and nothing is reported back to you. Microsoft publishes neither a way to detect these failures, or a way to fix them.
GPOtool accomplishes several goals.
- presents a report on the success of GPO based installs - allows one to delete failed installation stumps, and force a reinstall at the next GPO update - allows one to uninstall software – such as after a GPO is inadvertently deleted - provides a simple mechanism to reboot the ‘fixed’ machines
Prerequisites
Before you can run GPOtool you need:1. Copies of the free applications: psexec and psshutdown in the same directory as gpotool.
2. A ‘management’ computer which is not firewalled from your workstations. It needs to get administrator access to the workstations and open network shares.
3. A user account with Administrator rights on the workstations.
4. A text list of the workstations you wish to query, one per line.
