Home folders and user profile folders are separate things. It goes back to the good old WinNT days. The profile is all your settings and preferences (favorites and the like), and yes, by default it also includes your My Documents folder. You can share them, but if you map your My Documents folder to \\server\%username%, this will go to the server in their home folder (not really an iBay) and you can limit the amount of space they consume (if they're into storing heaps of photos, videos and music files for example) through the use of the SME quota. You can also see the stats of these and find out your big users. You can also map your My Docs to the home folder and make better use of smaller hard drives in the XP machines as they don't have to hold a local copy of everyone's documents. It also makes for faster logging on/off as they don't have to drag down all your documents off the server to your local My Docs folder every time you log on and off.
The disadvantage is that some programs (and they all seem to be M$ ones) don't like reliably opening files across the network - such as email. What you may not realise though is that there are two parts to your profile - the "local settings" part of the Xp machine does not get uploaded to the server, which often includes your email, depending on what email client you choose to use. You can edit all the major ones (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird that I know of) to point the data store to your saved profile, and thus have roaming email if you are using pop3. Otherwise you can use imap and keep all their email on the server. Email is another source of people filling up profile space.
There are other reasons for having My Docs on a network or home drive and separate from their profile such as when you have multiple logins under the same user (which you get in schools) - the teacher can access and assist with everyone's documents from one PC instead of having to go around all the PC's. And that way the profiles don't get overwritten (ie the My Docs) when users log off from the PC's one at a time, as the stored profile is only the last one to log off.
As for keeping H drive connected, are you correctly logging into the domain, or are you creating local users on the XP machines ? It shouldn't keep the home folder mapped after logging off. The Home Folder is mapped by SME when a user logs on as part of Samba when you are using roaming profiles, and gets removed when you log off. Using netlogon to remove it means your profile won't get correctly updated when you log off. Your profile automatically gets saved to \\server\profiles\username. I think this is why it is remembering the map after you log off. You could disable drive mapping persistence when you map it.
If you're worried about users clicking on the H drive and seeing all the other users profile folders (which they can't actually access), then you can hide the drives (using regedit or again putting in your logon script).
As for group policies - that's a windows server thing. You can't use it in an SME environment. If you want to stop users playing around with settings, then implement mandatory profiles (I do that in schools) or use lots of reg files in your logon.bat file.
If you want to change your home folder drive and or play easily play around with testing users and groups etc, install the e-smith-loginscript contrib. I think it works on 7.4, but I think there was a bit of a bug, can't remember. I got it working anyway.
16 Replies
127627 Views