So far in our ambition to migrate existing Group Policy Objects into RES PowerFuse we have detailed the shortcomings of doing so (Part 1) and discovered that all the registry settings for the User Container settings (“Administrative Templates” only) in a GPO are stored in the SYSVOL share as a REGISTRY.POL file (Part 2). Now we need to transpose the settings contained within the .POL file into a .REG file that is useable by RES PowerFuse.
Unfortunately, the .POL file format is a binary format that is not the same as the text-based .REG file format. There appears to be no easy way to view the contents of these files. The binary format is documented on the MSDN web site if you feel inclined to have a look. When we open a .POL file with notepad this is what we get:
Therefore, before we can import this into RES PowerFuse we need to convert it to a text-based .REG file. After many hours scouring the internet, only a handful of solutions seem to be available.
There do appear to be some commercial registry utilities, i.e. Registry Workshop, that permit the loading/viewing of .POL files. The evaluation version of Registry Workshop does not allow exporting so it is unclear as to whether a .POL file can be exported as a .REG file that we can use with RES PowerFuse. In addition, we’re after a solution that doesn’t cost any money.
An alternative is the REGVIEW.EXE utility in the Windows 2003 Server Resource Kit. This does allow us to view the contents of the REGISTRY.POL file. Running the utility displays the contents of a .POL in text format like this:
Unfortunately, this utility does not allow us to convert the REGISTRY.POL to a useful format, e.g. CSV. To utilise this tool we will have to redirect the output to a .TXT file, e.g. REGVIEW REGISTRY.POL > OUTPUT.TXT. Once in a plain text format we would then have to run another tool or script to convert the output to .REG. This is going to require some development time to implement.
To be continued…
