Windows Server 2012 Missing Internet Explorer Maintenance in Group Policy

Question

I have a fairly popular open source project that has a minimum cmake version set that is fairly old (~Oct 2013).

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8.12)

This is great for supporting a wide variety of users, but it makes adding new things to our cmake builds challenging, since we cannot use any of the new features in later cmake versions. This leads to complicated cmake files and more maintenance burden to emulate future improvements made to cmake.

I would like to support two CMakeLists.txt files for the project that have different minimum versions, one legacy one at the 2.8.12 version, and another more modern one at a later 3.x version. Is there any canonical way to do this? It doesn't look like there is a way to support multiple CMakeFiles.txt at the root of the project.

The naive way is to just rename the legacy file CMakeFiles_Legacy.txt and have users that depend on the older cmakes manually switch out the CMakeFiles.txt on their own.

Solution

In server 2012, IE management is done via IEAK (Internet Explorer Administration Kits)

You need to download and install the kit onto every domain controller for each version of IE that you want to manage.

The only exception to this is if you are running a GPCS (Group Policy Central Store) - in which case it only needs to be installed on one DC

To find out if you have GPCS installed, open the group policy manager on a domain controller and edit a random GPO, expand Computer/User Policies > Administrative Templates:

If you see "retrieved from the central store", you are using GPCS... if you see "retrieved from the local computer" - you are not using GPCS

Once you have this installed, you can continue to build a group policy preference for IE.

Comments

[I say Reinstate Monica]

Your question appears on-topic at Server Fault, not here at Super User.

[I say Reinstate Monica]

You seem to be asking two separate questions: 1) How can I get the equivalent of IEM's functionality on Server 2012, and 2) Using Server 2012, how can I set the default browser to IE? You should ask these separately.

[Tsyvarev]

The project's CMakeLists.txt could check CMake version via variable CMAKE_VERSION and according to checks use either "old" or "new" implementation.

[Moop]

@Tsyvarev I do that to an extent, to add new things that don't have any old implementation possible. The problem with this is the CMakeLists.txt becomes littered with conditionals and creates more maintenance burden. I wish to keep them separated in distinct files so I don't have conditionals to worry about.

[Tsyvarev]

The only way to avoid conditionals based on CMake version is to write the code which works both for newer and older versions. "I wish to keep them separated in distinct files so I don't have conditionals to worry about." - You could check the version in the main CMakeLists.txt and, depending on the version include either CMakeLists_legacy.txt or CMakeLists_new.txt.

[user3399457]

It's not actually a Domain Controller, it's a terminal server that has 30+ users connected to it meaning that there's no room for error and down time must be kept to a minimal. Would this still work? Or are there any better alternatives?

[Fazer87]

Should work either way, although I've never tried this as I've always worked with domains.

[Moop]

Thanks for your blog post, especially the table of versions. However, we are still supporting old tools like VS2013, Windows 7, and pre C++1z compilers, so I don't want to break those users who have really old tools. Of course, I wish all users are keeping up their tools, and cmake is pretty easy to upgrade.

[Alex Reinking]

@Moop - CMake 3.22 still supports Visual Studio as old as VS6 and AFAIK Kitware's MSIs will install on Windows 7, even though all of those tools are well past EOL. I'd wager it will be an order of magnitude more work to set up a multi-version CMake build (which will have to be continuously tested in those old environments) than to help the few stragglers update a single build tool.

[Alex Reinking]

CMake 3.14 dropped support for Windows XP and Vista, but Windows 7 is still supported today.