Topic: long login/out times - my documents/etc

[arthurhanlon]

While My Documents isn't the profile it is part of the user profile as it is in C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Documents

Sorry Ray, you are correct, that used to remapping "My Documents" to another data partition I forget it's original location  

As I see it, if you are using Roaming Profiles and if you point My Documents at H: drive, then the files will be saved on H: drive on the server and also in the user profile on the server, thus saving the files in My Documents twice on the server (although I have not tested this to prove the theory).

As said previously, I remap "My Documents" to a separate partition  just to be on the safe side and once remapped, all saves to this folder go to the new mapping only and not into the profile. You said you have not tested this so thought I would mention as this is what I do.

Hope this helps,

Arthur

[dwater]

FWIW I tell users to think about it. If its on the server it gets backed up and if it's on the workstation, it doesn't.

Eh? Even stuff in 'My Documents' ends up on the server when they log out, and so is backed up.

Then, if their stuff is backed up, do you really need the roaming profiles ....?

Well, my users want to roam, so, yes.

I'm not sure what your point is, but I feel like you're trying to tell me something...care to elaborate?

Max.

[dhardy]

What are they trying to achieve when they roam?

If you just want them to be able to login at any PC, they can log in to any machine in the samba domain.

If you want them to be able to have their email and files available on every machine then configure their email as IMAP and get their files stored on the H: drive - and that will be available at any machine in the domain. Write a how-to to show them how to configure their email client for imap (usually only 4 or 5 steps) and show them the webmail working - I bet when they roam to another PC 90% are happier using the webmail for a day or so, if its longer they'll set up outlook express / thunderbird / whatever following the how-to.

If you want their email, my documents, entire user profile, wallpaper and things from the start menu to follow them around from PC to PC and back again, then use roaming profiles.

<rant about how awful roaming profiles are>

The downside of roaming profiles is that the whole profile gets copied from the server at login and written back to the server at logoff. If the user has a problem with a computer (or gets frustrated and shuts it down with the power button) and then logs in somewhere else, the 'current' profile may be less up to date than the one on the computer which has had a problem, and then the server copy gets synchronsed with an incorrect profile which leads to data loss (or 'misplacing' when it is there somewhere, but you need to find which computer its on).

Also, should a profile become corrupted (and they do, much more often than you'd credit) then that user is pretty much stuffed and its over to the backup to repair it or hunt the network for the most recent version of their profile that you can find (but not logging on as them as that will overwrite the profile with an empty one ....)

Roaming profiles are a really complicated feature which IMO (like dynamic disks in the Windows server world) should be left alone until they are fully understood as the capacity they have for creating horribly confusing situations and enormous delays in network logon/off is really not conveyed by the bland two line note in the workgroup panel.

Should this server support roaming profiles? You should leave this set to the default of No unless you have experience administering server-based Windows roaming profiles and know that this feature is required.

The two worst aspects of roaming profiles, in my experience, are:

1. users never actually cleanup a profile and 'start again' - they just keeping adding to their roaming profile for ever, which causes it to pump up to unbelievable sizes. One little folder containing a few hundred megabytes left on the desktop will drag the logon process almost to a halt - and the user will blame the server / the network / the computer / the administrator ...

2. Roaming profiles take all the personal settings from one PC and apply them to the others - so if user A has software installed on computer 1 and its in a 'personalised start menu' then that user will log on to computer 2 which doesn't have the software, but magically does have the start menu entry .... So user   A knows the software isn't on computer 2 so she deletes the entry from the start menu to avoid any confusion. Your're probably ahead of me here, but when user A returns to computer 1 the profile loads and the icon is no longer in the start menu ....
There was also a period when Temporary Internet Files were included in the profile - which is what really did it for me, when a user downloaded an enormous iso image and put it on the desktop so the profile had 2 copies of it ..... I ditched profiles then (it was ages ago now, I don't remember whether it was NT4, W2K or XP on the clients) and haven't looked back.

For users who just want to 'use' the computers roaming profiles seem to be a panacea, in practice they are a nightmare to teach users why they work how they do and when they go wrong they are a nightmare to repair.

</rant about how awful roaming profiles are>

Finally, users do understand drive letters and that 'the H: drive is yours, everyone has one and its personalised to them' - if you explain to them that every computer they logon to has a full copy of their My Documents folder they won't like that at all - especially if you make all users administrators on their PCs (or have FAT16 / FAT32 file systems) as they'll have high enough privileges to go wandering through the other profiles installed on their computer.

So, back to the orignal question at the top of this post...

What are they trying to achieve when they roam?

Sorry for the rant - I believe computers should make for an easy life and I get really frustrated by the things that are well intentioned but riddled with issues...

Regards

David.