I was posting a message on a forum the other day about troubleshooting the infamous Group Policy 1058 and 1030 event log errors. There, I made the observation that Group Policy troubleshooting was especially hard because it involves so many moving parts working in tandem. Group Policy relies on AD, DNS, SYSVOL replication and a healthy client to successfully do what it needs to do. For this reason, even these 1058 and 1030 errors can have multiple root-causes--making the whole process of troubleshooting Group Policy fairly daunting to even the most advanced systems administrator. That being said, there are some logical steps you can walk through to ensure that Group Policy is working on a given system and, if not, help to track down the root cause.

The first thing I tell anyone who is troubleshooting a Group Policy problem to do is go to their Group Policy Management Console (GPMC) tool, highlight the Group Policy Results node, right-click and run the Group Policy Results Wizard against the target computer and user that is having problems.

The Group Policy Results wizard does two main things for you. It tells you whether GP processing succeeded or failed for the computer and user you've connected to (you'll find that under the "Component Status" section). It also shows you what settings should have been applied to the computer and user (under the "Settings" tab on the report). Armed with these two pieces of information, you can now eliminate problems involving misconfiguration, security group filtering or linking errors and simply verify that what you expect to happen is happening.

Now, if this report tells you that Group Policy processing is broken on the client, that's where things start to get interesting. Tomorrow, I'll give you tips on how you can go to the "next level" in terms of troubleshooting GP processing issues.

Written by Guest Blogger Darren Mar-Elia. Darren is CTO & Founder of SDM Software (www.sdmsoftware.com), a Group Policy Solutions company. SDM Software develops and sells product to improvement the manageability and reliability of Windows systems that leverage Group Policy. The GPExpert™ Troubleshooting Pak (www.sdmsoftware.com/group_policy_troubleshoot) is an example of one of these products--a set of four utilities that help speed time-tor-resolution of Group Policy problems.