Define User Profile With A Group Policy

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We're currently trying to deploy a lab environment which uses a shared
mandatory user profile, but have been unable to work out how to create a
group policy that will setthe profile path of any
user who logs on, to a specified path.

The ideal situation will be that whenever someone signs onto a computer in
the "Lab Computers"
OU, their user profile path is set to a mandatory profile sitting on
\\servername\student$ They do
their thing from there, and when they log off, it cleans up the local copy.

There's a section in group policy to set the TS profile path, but this
appears to have no affect on
anyone logging in directly. If the profile path is manually set on the user
account in active
directory it all works perfectly, but this change wouldn't be restricted to
the Lab OU, and would
become a nightmare to manage for tens of thousands of accounts.

Thankyou,
Christian
 
We're currently trying to deploy a lab environment which uses
a shared
mandatory user profile, but have been unable to work out how
to create a
group policy that will setthe profile path of any
user who logs on, to a specified path.

The ideal situation will be that whenever someone signs onto a
computer in
the "Lab Computers"
OU, their user profile path is set to a mandatory profile
sitting on
\servernamestudent$ They do
their thing from there, and when they log off, it cleans up
the local copy.

There's a section in group policy to set the TS profile path,
but this
appears to have no affect on
anyone logging in directly. If the profile path is manually
set on the user
account in active
directory it all works perfectly, but this change wouldn't be
restricted to
the Lab OU, and would
become a nightmare to manage for tens of thousands of
accounts.

Thankyou,
Christian
Click to expand...

Hi,

I am not sure if this is possible. Users Profiles are per user and you
can only have "one". You might be able to achieve something "similar"
with Group Policies using Folder Redirection (Desktop, App Data, Start
Menu etc) as well as Loopback Processing for only the Lab machines you
want in order to achieve your desired result.

What is the specific issue you are trying to achieve? I use mandatory
roaming profiles but the users have them wheverever they go. I have
only 2400 Users so I have about 6 or 7 custom ones and I change their
profile in their account depending on what they need access to.

You can setup machines to automatically delete roaming profiles at
logoff and not cache any profiles at all. I created a startup script
that deleted all profiles in the Documents and Settings folder except
the Administrator, All Users and Default User.

Cheers,

Lara
 
Some of our users will be logging into lab machines, as well as, say, their
postgrad research
machine. If we configure their profile path to be the standard lab mandatory
profile, when they
go back to logging into their research machine, they will be given the lab
profile again. We
wanted to avoid lab machine specific changes from being applied anywhere but
on lab machines.

We want to get to the point where anyone logging into any lab machine will
use a standard
mandatory profile (sitting on a share on one of the lab servers), and the
local copy made will
be cleaned up once the user logs out. The cleanup bit is done through a
group policy already,
but making sure the user profile path is pointing at the mandatory profile,
just for lab machines,
is the part that appears to be impossible.

Thankyou for your reply,
Christian Fenn
 
Some of our users will be logging into lab machines, as well
as, say, their
postgrad research
machine. If we configure their profile path to be the standard
lab mandatory
profile, when they
go back to logging into their research machine, they will be
given the lab
profile again. We
wanted to avoid lab machine specific changes from being
applied anywhere but
on lab machines.

We want to get to the point where anyone logging into any lab
machine will
use a standard
mandatory profile (sitting on a share on one of the lab
servers), and the
local copy made will
be cleaned up once the user logs out. The cleanup bit is done
through a
group policy already,
but making sure the user profile path is pointing at the
mandatory profile,
just for lab machines,
is the part that appears to be impossible.

Thankyou for your reply,
Christian Fenn
Click to expand...

Hi,

It sounds like you need to use the Group Policies instead of the
Mandatory Profile. As Profiles are per user they can’t be per
computer unless you do away with roaming all together.

You can do a lot with Group Policies. In fact almost everything. Using
the Loopback Mode you can set the policies to only affect the users
when they log into the Lab Machines.

Cheers,

Lara
 
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