Justin Garrison's questions

I need to apply a GPO on all machines with IE 10+ but the setting does not need to be and shouldn't be applied to ie 9. All the machines are Windows Vista, 7, and 8 (some 32 bit and others 64).

I found two ways to do it

1. Check the iexplorer.exe version number in c:\program files\internet explorer\
2. Select MicrosoftIE_Summary from \root\cimv2\Applications\MicrosoftIE

The first method seems like a complete hack and probably is not the best way to go about figuring out the version of IE that is actually used by the system (e.g. what about program files x86)

SELECT path,filename,extension,version FROM CIM_DataFile WHERE path="\\Program Files\\Internet Explorer\\" AND filename="iexplore" AND extension="exe" AND version>"8.0"

The second way uses built in WMI namespaces and classes but from what I can tell Microsoft removed the \root\cimv2\Applications\MicrosoftIE namespace from every OS after Windows XP.

root\cimv2\Applications\MicrosoftIE;SELECT * FROM MicrosoftIE_Summary WHERE Version = '8.0.6001.18702'

Does anyone know if there is a new namespace in Windows 7/8 that stores the Internet Explorer version or maybe there's a third way to filter my GPO someone knows about that I haven't found.

I have a Red Hat 5.8 server that is bound to active directory and users are authenticated via active directory when they log in via sftp. User home folders are created during login using /etc/pam.d/system-auth. The specific line that creates the home folder is

session optional pam_mkhomedir.so skel=/etc/skel/ umask=0066

This correctly gives home folders 711 permissions so no one else can read their directories. The problem is, the pam_mkhomedir.so also modifies permissions on all folders/files inside the /etc/skel folder which I don't want. There is a public_html folder (for apache) which needs to have 755 permissions so users can create web pages.

Is there a way for me to either a) stop pam_mkhomedir.so from recursively changing all the file permissions or b) create a script that creates the public_html folder after skel is copied and to set the correct permissions?

I have an internal website that I need to strip some components via CSS only for specific users (kiosk users). Is there a way I can apply the CSS file via group policy my kiosk OU? The kiosks connect to IE8 via XenApp on a thin client so it is difficult for me to apply the setting manually for each user or on the local machine. Any help finding a way to do this would be appreciated.

I have a couple users who need multiple email addresses (alias) forwarded to their accounts but setting up a separate user and forwarding the email is showing the email to the users main address instead of the aliased email.

For example, here is what I need: [email protected] is the users email address but they also need to receive emails sent to [email protected], and [email protected]. When the emails are sent to the other two email addresses I want them to be forwarded to the user and showing that it was sent to the redundancy email address and not john.doe because the user needs to be able to filter these emails as well as reply from the redundancy department email address.

How can I set up alias' in exchange 2010 to work this way?

Thanks

We are looking to replace our current Kix scripts with Powershell scripts and I was curious how to test group membership to map network drives. Our current kix script basically just does an if statement on every user group and tests if the user is a part of that group, if they are, it maps a network drive. Here is an example:

If InGroup("ADGROUP")
  Use m: "\\server\share"
EndIf

I doubt this is the most efficient way to do this but I wanted to ask how I can accomplish the same thing in PowerShell and what people recommend for a proper way to map drives and printers for users in Active Directory.

If this information is needed all of our clients are on Windows Vista/7 and we are just now moving to AD 2008.