Applying the SCT to standalone hardened systems?

OK, more updates.

Upon additional review, all of the GPO's that I'd selected were actually already included in the Member_Server_Install.cmd script.

The reason why I'd gone down this weird path was that when I tried to apply the "Member_Server_Install.cmd" script, some of the security settings that I'd expected to be modified were not being modified.  Things like the Audit Policy settings or the System Access settings - the script would run, wouldn't generate any errors but the settings would remain unmodified from their original default values.

The two main GPO subfolders that didn't seem to be triggering were:

GPO subfolder: {088E04EC-440C-48CB-A8D7-A89D0162FBFB}
Security Topic: Win2016 - Member Baseline

GPO subfolder: {9C87270F-7704-41D9-A76D-C8B9ADB1794A}
Security Topic: Win2016 - Member Server Baseline

I'd extracted the baseline zip file to c:\Users\Administrator\Downloads, which meant that the total filepath just to get to the baseline content (GPOs, Local_Script, etc.) was:

C:\Users\Administrator\Downloads\Windows 10 Version 1607 and Windows Server 2016 Security Baseline\Windows-10-RS1-and-Server-2016-Security-Baseline

On a lark, I shifted the "Windows-10-RS1-and-Server-2016-Security-Baseline" folder to the root of c:\ and re-ran.  All of the expected script processing ran fine - including the Audit Policy and System Access settings.  I'm guessing now that the path size was somehow violating the max size limits and was mucking with the script run.

I feel kinda sheepish at this point - but I guess it was a good troubleshooting exercise 🙂

Tariq