Topic: Roaming Profiles

[arthurhanlon]

Hi there,

First off, great peice of kit, easy to set up and very use to admin. We are currently integrating one of these machine on a small LAN at my office.

I have a question about roaming profiles though. At work we are using win2k servers and there is a way to limit the space taken up by profiles. Is there a way to do this in SME? I don't want my users eating up my disk space.

Thanks,

Arthur

[Reinhold]

arthur

There are three main SME manuals. User / Technicians and
Admin Guide with the latter being the one to consult for this

Also you can search for "roaming" in the "Search Site Box" on the right top with almost certain success.

Regards
Reinhold

[arthurhanlon]

Hi, thanks for the reply.

It may just be me but I can't see anything on limiting the profile sizes but, on a god note, I now know where the profiles are stored  

Cheers,

Arthur

[azche24]

Hi Arthur,

It may just be me but I can't see anything on limiting the profile sizes but, on a god note, I now know where the profiles are stored  

Arthur

there is a serious problem. Yesterday (and night   ) i changed a complete server to new hardware. And i learned, that 1,7  GB of the backup-stuff was trashcans in the user-profiles compared to 450 MB real data; ugly  

Mozilla-Profiles also go to the server. I have to change that on the client side.

[guest22]

<thought>
MS Profiles are a MS specific product. SME Server is an industry starndard product handling industry standard stuff.

Preventing a user to fill up diskspace unlimited can be handled by disk quotas.
</thought>

[arthurhanlon]

Thanks for the thoughts.

SME Server boasts integration with Windows and Apple networks with the ability to become the Windows PDC. Since I use an MS network, it made sense for me to assume that there was a way to control these profiles other than assigning a global quota.

No problems, still a great product which I will continue to use.  

Arthur

[alejandro]

Profile size is not suposed to be determined by SME,
turning on Quotas is a partial solution because you 'll get a limit without a hierachical criteria or rational use of this quotas,
The criteria used to limit roaming profile size should be defined from workstation's side
Probably you'll get a beter result limiting the roaming profile size from inside windows. (if it was posible, or well documented)

[jimb]

Hello Arthur...
There are a couple of sites I found usefull in getting to grips with bloated user profiles....

http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/realmen/det/skel.en.html
and
http://www.css.tayloru.edu/~nehresma/samba.html

However the latter is now password protected...
 
E-mail nathan_ehresman@taylor.edu and see if he'll come to the party...

That said after several years of persisting with roaming profiles on our PDC we have turned them off in Serve-Manager
with no complaints from the users thereby saving about 10Gb of disk space.
Logon scripts still work as before...
hope this helps ....
Cheers JimB

[azche24]

Hi,

That said after several years of persisting with roaming profiles on our PDC we have turned them off in Serve-Manager
with no complaints from the users thereby saving about 10Gb of disk space.

Turning off roaming profiles seems no good idea to me. Have to reinstall a Workstation about every six months and this turns out to be ugly without roaming profiles. Backup of profiles becomes complicated (and is needed).

Also we log in at different WS here. And i really need my little tools at my workspace, whereever i am. Also Mozilla and Thunderbird Profiles should be stored on the server for the same reason.

But your link to switzerland was very helpful! That points into the right direction:

1. Keep TEMP-Files and Browser Cache off the Profiles.
2. Redirect this ugly "MyDocuments" folder to a real HOME, where the users can directly store and load it (a already implemented that by simply moving the desktop link to HOME\%USERNAME%\OWNSTUFF manually. But that seems to be inconsistent. Some files again get into the profile directories.
3. Restrict the copying of unwanted Directories by editing registry.
4. Give Users back some privacy at the WS (the DocumentsAndSettings structure is readable by everyone - so all real user data should bei in home, where only user itself and admin should have rights).
Because i still am no linux guru   i will just try to contribute a little user documentation (administration of samba users in an office environment...).