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I'm not sure how exactly to ask this question.

At my small company we've decided to use group policy to set all users homepage to a pretty html file. We also are going to force IE to open upon logging in. This will ensure all those announcements management wants everyone to see will at least be up in front of everyones face at some point during the day.

So. Users also use Terminal Services to log into Server 2003. And do this quite often. I think it will be unnecessary and annoying to have IE auto-open on Server 2003. This is what I'm trying to avoid.

Log into PC > IE > html. Then immediately use TS > IE > html. 25% of my users work mostly in TS so it'd be nice if I could block/uninstall IE from the TS Server.

Or if you have any other ideas how to exclude the server logins from initiating the whole thing I'd love to hear them.


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3 Answers

Group Policy is based on the application of a policy linked to one or more OUs and than scoped to a group of computers. It would have been better to restrict the scope of the policy launching the HTML page to just the workstations.

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So, for those interested I did it like this: On the server I applied permissions to iexplore.exe to deny any read/execute permissions. Seems to work just fine. If you click iexplore.exe it will tell you you're denied. However, when the GP attempts to open it upon logging in it quietly denies you access in the background.

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For relatively small environments I've put hostname checks in login scripts where I don't want something to fire when logging in interactively.

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Hmm. I've got 80 users, give or take. I'm a newb with login scripts I guess. What would this login script look like? –  gtaylor85 Mar 31 '11 at 16:15
@gtaylor85 Depends on what you write it in, but the logic is "IF local_hostname <> MyWin2003Server THEN LaunchIE". The login script is run in the context of whatever machine the user is loggin in on. For larger arenas there are ways you can pull the operating system name. If you are not already using login scripts then, admittedly, you'd have some work to do to set this up. Typically login scripts are common to big groups of users and each user is assigned the same login script. –  squillman Mar 31 '11 at 16:23
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