Tuesday, April 15, 2014

How to configure Group policy to lock the servers after fixed interval

Windows servers repeatedly starts a screen saver after a server  has been idle for a specified amount of time. This screen saver can be password protected. You can use Group Policy to enforce this setting for all servers in a  domain. Users won’t be able to disable the automatic locking once after configured via group policy. We can specify for how much time server should lock automatically.Below procedure is for domain computers.If you want to implement for any windows xp ,windows 7,windows 8 machines you need to do same settings in your local group policy.You can open group policy with “gpedit.msc” command without quotes.
Click “Start”. Open “Group Policy Management” from administrative tools.
Group policy
Right Click on Domain and click “Create and link a GPO Here”. Give name of the policy.
create a group policy
Right click on Policy name (In my case it was “Auto Lock”) and click edit.
auto lock
We can see “Group Policy Object editor”. Select  “User configuration” “administrative template” “control panel” and then  “Display”.
Here you need to enable below two options.
  • Enable “Password protected the screen saver”
  • Enable “Screensaver timeout”
Screen Saver
You can configure for how much time do you want to auto lock. In my case it was 300 Seconds.
Screensaver timeout
Go to client machine and run below command to apply the group policy forcefully.
Open command prompt. Type “gpupdate /force” without quote.Log off the machine and login and check after 5 Min. Client machine will automatically lock after 5 Min.

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