Lower case ‘t’ in GPO? Nah…
Came across something very odd in Group Policy Management today. I was attempting to break a GPO into two separate GPO’s – one for staff, and one for students. The actual splitting was the easy part. The difficulty came when I decided to indicate which was for Staff and which was for Students. I was not able to use a lowercase ‘t’ in the name of the GPO. Any other letter was fine! I quickly toggled my Windows key, Ctrl key, Alt key, and anything else to make sure I wasn’t experiencing an input error caused by my hardware. I then ended my mRemoteNG session, and fired up RDP directly thinking maybe mRemoteNG was messing with something. I even undocked my Lenovo P70, and used the built-in keyboard. I was stumped. I needed a solution, so I opened up notepad, typed the name I wanted, and then copied and pasted it over to rename the GPO. I couldn’t leave it at that. I had to figure out what was going on.
You are probably reading this right now, and you have your own ideas of what you would have tried. And you probably expect me to say that I was able to diagnose the issue and detail how I fixed it. Well…that’s not going to happen. I took to the phones and walked two other admins through this at different companies. Both experienced the same issue. Here is how you can check it out for yourself!
- Launch Group Policy Management
- Expand the “Group Policy Objects” folder (near the bottom of the folder list)
- Select a GPO…I used a disabled one for this example, so as to not interfere with anything
- Now, if you right click and rename, all is well. It will work. You can type a lowercase ‘t’. But…
- Select the ‘Settings’ tab on the right hand side.
- Now on the left hand side, in your list of GPO’s, right click and try to append a lone ‘t’ to the end of your GPO name. Can’t do it! You also cannot press backspace
This was a perfect storm. I was checking the settings that were applied by the GPO and then decided to rename the object. Give it a shot and see what you get!
Shameless plug for mRemoteNG? Yea. That’s what this entire blog entry is all about!
