Home / News / Archives

September 26, 2003: Terra Novum announces a new updated version of the EZ GPO Network Administrators tool. This version contains a work around for Microsoft's Power Management initialization problem detailed in prior releases and below. There is nothing an administrator need do to enable this work around.

This has been released under a BSD style Open Source license. By releasing this tool as open source, Terra Novum and the EPA ensure that all citizens will benefit from the work and knowledge that went into making the tool a reality.

EZ GPO is a tool for network administrators who manage Windows client workstations using Group Policy Objects under Active Directory, Novell NDS/Zenworks or any other client registry management system. It gives centralized control to network administrators over the user's power management settings. Something, due to the designs of Microsoft's implementation of power management, is impossible using normal techniques. The readme gives the basic overview of methodology and installation. For more detailed documentation please see here and here for more information.

There had been an issue with some installations of Windows 2000+ and use of the EZ GPO tool. The tool would work as advertised and change the power management settings (as evidenced by the control panel applet for power management) but the computer will continue to keep power managing using the original default settings. The situation arised where users are limited in their rights to "Restricted Users" and the administrator had not logged into the machine that served as image master and viewed power management settings. This is a bug in Microsoft's initialization of the power management subsystem and was not a coding bug in the EZ GPO tool.

---