Setup BGINFO via GPO on all your Servers

hey everyone david here with another standardization tip for windows two segments today i'm going to be talking about a little-known program called BG info and basically what BG info does or can do is display the system information like system name IP address free space hard drive space stuff like that on the background of the current user that's logged in to the server this is useful if you have a number of different servers and you want to be able to know which one you're working on right away especially if you do a lot of remote system administration it's nice to know what server you connected to just by looking at the systems background I usually have my 3 or 4 RDP sessions going on at the same time so it can get confusing you certainly don't want to reboot the wrong server at the wrong time you have all with your people jumping on you on your back if that happens so this is one way to avoid that so here I have my virtual proving ground running on VirtualBox basically it's just a number of different servers that are running on virtual machines on my computer and VirtualBox and here is a 2012 member server and a 2012 domain controller and both these servers what what I want to do is have the background BG info program launch and configure the background with all the information about each particular server in a certain way but have it done via group policy on all my servers I can also expand this to include workstations but for right now I'm just going to concentrate on servers because that's what I mostly spend a lot of time remote and ministry administering so here's how to do it essentially before I get into how to push a BG info using a group policy object when I quickly talk about how it works that way a better understanding of how the software works itself and how to basically push it using GPO so I've got BG info downloaded to my computer in a shared folder called BG info and deployments the plugins are basically a four that I used to push a bunch of stuff up to different workstations of my virtual environment but BG intro is basically it's a small program available from sysinternals you can download it it's been around for a long time it's eight hundred kilobytes and basically when you launch it what it does is it allows you to take a bunch of information and display it on your systems background so if I just took the defaults open the program this is what it would look like it would tell me you know my system name and the CPU type and IP address gateway subnet mask all the information and it would just basically create a background BMP file bitmap file and apply that to the current system so that when I logged into it I would see all this information that know which system I'm working on great so I've already customized this to suit my needs because I don't like this default way it looks I've created a BG info file called VL metabee GI basically by taking this default mucking around with it until I like the way it looks but you know changing the fonts and moving things around a bit and then clicking on file save as and saving the resultant file as VL medevac BG I so I'm going to open that file and show you what it looks like so here is my the file that I like to see on most of my servers and this is the file that we're going to be pushing out to all over servers so it's nice because it has all my information that I want to see right at the top and large bold red letters so I know that I'm now connected to my domain controller it's when a 2008 server r2 Service Pack 1 with 2 gigs of RAM C Drive is 45 gigs the S Drive is 10 gigs you know last time it was rebooted what the roles of the server are IP address and all the information so this is really nice to have and I'd like to see it in all my servers so here is how we're going to apply this particular background information file to all of our servers using a group policy on before I do that I'm going to go ahead and set my screen display products back to a black desktop background just so we can make sure that it works properly gonna go back to display change this a background solid colors there you go there we go now we changed our desktop background to just a blank desktop background we're going to go ahead and work on creating a group policy object that will go ahead and push PG info including the settings file that we will have already created to a bunch of servers anything really in organizational unit or a number of organization you however you want to deal with this is really up to you first thing we do is going to create a group policy object that's in my case I've created as a computer based policy but you can create it as a user policy whatever you want I denote my group policy objects will see or you depending on whether a computer or the user based and in this case of created a group a computer based group policy object name server desktop BGN phone all right I'm going to edit that and I'm going to go and go into group policy preferences because that's where I do a lot of work I have a nice high level domain so good policy preferences is my friend I can do a lot of stuff without having to do a whole lot of work and I'm going to go ahead and create first the folder structure that I want to have in this area on the local Drive the reason why I do this is because when I try to launch this if I try to deploy this with just shortcuts to the network share so right now on my domain controller I've got deployments is a network share it's like what bze deployments I can access my BG info file but if I just push that you know shortcuts to this file to other machines I'm going to get permissions error whenever I execute this file and that's just because of the nature of 2012 in 2008 r2 server and security principles and things like that so really to get around that what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy this entire structure you see here to the C drives of all my servers using a group policy object that way I won't have to deal with security permission issues that come up when I try to launch a file from the network so to do that I'm going to go ahead and create some folders first I'm going to create a folder structure on the C Drive in a folder called Apps goes in a folder called abscess where I put a lot of stuff that are kind of useful to me and I'll first create a folder called Apps then a folder called BG info inside Apps and then a folder called scripts inside BG info inside Apps and if all those settings inside BG info inside Apps the settings folder will call will contain my BG I file and the scripts folder will contain a VBS file that is used by BG info to look up all the information that's going to be displayed on a background alright so here's my folder structure I'm going to create some files basically pop populate the folder structure from my network here on my networks here I already have the entire folder structure but I'm going to go ahead and copy those files to the local folder structure on creating so basically I'm going to copy the BG info HD file inside apps BG info I'm going to copy the network VBS file inside the scripts folder on the local Drive and the DGI file inside the settings folder so that should create a nice local folder structure called apps and inside apps should be a folder called BG info with an exit Exe file and these two subfolders with the corresponding files so that really is all I need for BG info to work on my two servers however and 1pg info should also be automatically launched when the user logs in so I don't want it just to have this be created and have to have a user go in to see apps and double click BG info to display this stuff on the background I want it to automatically happen as soon as the user logs in without any other interaction that way the user sees right away what Survey's connected to and it can be no confusion about what server he's actually performing work on so do that I'm going to go ahead and create a shortcut I'm going to create a shortcut and the common startup directory of the particular server the group policy object runs on so I'm going to create a shortcut and name it BG info the action that's going to be update which will basically create the object if it doesn't exist but update the object if it does exist which is useful to me I'm going to choose a target path to be the the path that I created using the folders and files using the same group apology policy object here basically I'm going to point it to see apps BG info BG info exe I'm going to have any arguments I'm going to call my settings file and I'm also going to pass some parameters that will basically say don't launch the GUI of BG info disable the timer and set it to zero or just set the timer to zero and accept the license prompt that usually pops up the first time you launch BG info or don't display devices so those three parameters I'm going to pass in addition to the settings file so what that will do is it will go ahead and have my nice went read customized background displayed automatically when the user logs in alright perfect so that is what I need I'm going to have all this information enough you know in text on my website for you as well so you can just copy and paste from there perfect so now we have our group policy object defined let me go ahead and close this and close that and give it a test so basically I've got my group policy object created I'm going to go ahead and link it to the only organizational unit that contains member servers and my domain controllers organizational unit so this basically contains the current server that we're working on dc1 this oh you contains the other server that we're going to be working on my 2012 server I use this server for a number of different things but we're just going to use them in a test scenario here to make sure that our group policy object works and so I'm going to link the group policy object I've created in both of these organizational units and then I'm going to run a TP update just to make sure that everything is pushed so I'm going to run them out TP / force and let it go so what this is going to do is going to go ahead and apply the group policy object we've just created - any organizational units and any computers in those organizational units so it should basically apply to this computer here dc1 and 2k12 which is my 2012 server so alright now that's done I'm going to go ahead and make sure that my local structure has been created so on my DC computer I'm going to go ahead and look at the local C Drive and voila there's our apps folder and it contains a BG info folder and looks like files have copied successfully so that's good and now I'm going to go ahead and test to make sure it works I'm going to log off the same industry day and then log back in and hopefully what will happen is that I'll get a desktop with my BG info and whoa there it is so it is basically created the local structure from the BG info executables and it has created a system startup shortcut if I look under my startup they should be a new file you know perfect there it is called BG info and that file should have my settings file so it will go to BG info and their settings and I'll have the parameters that I defined so perfect this is working just like I want it to so let's go ahead and make sure it works on other servers so on this server basically what I'll have to do here as well I'll have to do a GP update to make sure I can be boot to server as well but I want to just test this right away without waiting for to reboot sometimes to a GP update force and then you log off and log back in and it should get me my background so this should go ahead and create all the directory structure that we need here when I go in I see drive make sure yep BG info settings looks like everything is created perfect let's go ahead and make sure our startup entries created startup U there's our BG info perfect so that's all there all right well let's go ahead and try this out log off and log back in and make sure that the info gets pushed all right go systems logging in and something here well there it is so there is my BG intro for this particular server looks like this just a little bit slower booting logging in and the other server but here is my information so I have all that stuff about when the server was not rebooted and what roles it has so perfect like it one thing that I did notice that it's not quite as good as determining the roles this server here actually is a Windows deployment server so for some reason it looks like that role is not showing here so don't know what's up with that but you know there are newer versions of PG info available than the one that I'm using here so that is very likely the cause but yeah so there you have it within a nutshell how to get your servers to run PG info to display all the information you really want to see on the desktop background of your server or servers have a good one Thanks

Channel: David Vielmetter

Views: 47,704

Keywords: bginfo, info on desktop, server info, background, show stats desktop, server stats desktop, group policy bginfo, bginfo via gpo, deploy bginfo, server system info, desktop background, Microsoft Windows (Operating System), Windows server

Id: -HoO10Ke_6g

Length: 14min 55sec (895 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 05 2014