HOWTO: share a local profile and a domain profile

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Guest

Hello there,

I have been meditating upon migration from a local workstation to a domain.
I joined the domain, I logged in to my account and… all my documents and
settings were gone. Ugh…

I wanted to have access to my documents and settings from both profiles. I
have a different identifier on the local machine and in the domain; assume
they are called locself and domself.

I added parental right for user DOMAIN\domself to \Documents and
Settings\locself; now I had access to the documents but not to the settings.
I tried accessing \Documents and Settings\locself as a roaming profile but
it failed because it tried to copy all my documents upon login and it caused
a disk full condition.
I tried setting \Documents and Settings\locself as my home directory which
obviously did not do the trick because it has nothing to do with the settings.
I tried copying my profile using the System control panel but it caused a
disk full condition again. I waited quite some time before the "Applying
user settings" welcome message but nothing happened and I had to do a hard
restart because there was no way out.
I tried setting the USERPROFILE environment variable to point to my local
profile; Outlook mail settings did not work because they are stored in the
registry (under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT; I lost a lot of time
trying to find them under HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office).
I tried copying just my NTUSER.DAT file (as an administrator, of course) but
the registry ceased to be writable and the desktop looked very funny and did
not work well.
I went back and allowed DOMAIN\domself parental rights from my local
account's regedit and copied NTUSER.DAT again. The shell worked but the
secure HTTP protocol did not (I was unable to log on to MSN Messenger and to
Microsoft Passport).
I trashed my DOMAIN\myself profile and moved My Documents folder outside my
%USERPROFILE%. It reduced the size of my profile from 2 GB to 25 MB. Now I
was able to copy it. I was afraid the copy starts copying all my documents
again but this did fortunately did not happen. I logged in to the domain
and… I landed in \Documents and Settings\domself.DOMAIN instead of \Documents
and Settings\domself I created. It presented the generic desktop.
I trashed both \Documents and Settings\domself and \Documents and
Settings\domself.DOMAIN. I logged into the generic pulpit in \Documents and
Settings\domself, logged out, copied the profile locself to the folder
domself as above and logged in to the domain. This time my folder did not
get the .DOMAIN extension so I was happy in the domain with my own desktop.
The last step was to set the USERPROFILE environment variable to point to my
original locself folder. This allowed me to to trash the Application Data
and reduce the size of the domself folder from 25 MB to 5 MB (for the
registry data; this is unavoidable).

Conclusion: If you prepare to join the domain or to share your profile with
anybody, presumably with yourself in the domain, move the your documents
folder outside your %USERPROFILE%; otherwise the system will attempt to copy
all your documents which is what you do not want. Also consider moving your
mail folders out of %APPDATA% if you are going to share it with yourself; it
is no good to have two copies and you are not going to log in to the domain
and to the local machine simultaneously so there is no danger of lock
conflict.

Any thoughts?
 
I would exercise a little caution in copying the registry hive between
profiles. The issue here is that some (ill-behaved) programs write
absolute-paths to their data-files into the user branch of the registry, and
in this case the program will still open the data-file from the old location
regardless.

Thus, you can end-up with a situation where two users have 'merged inboxes'
- or worse you can lose data entrirely, because a user who backs-up their own
profile - thinking this should cover them - won't suspect that some data is
being stored in the wrong profile.

The same applies to moving 'Application Data' -in some cases this contains
settings-files, and these point to absolute paths. Surprisingly this even
applies to some Mozilla apps.

If all programs were written according to MS guidelines this wouldn't arise,
but then this the real world, and basically it pays to make no assumptions on
this score.
 
I did not intend to share profiles across different users. I want to have a
shared profile for a user (myself) with two identities: a local identity and
a network identity. Therefore I want all application data to be in one
place. There is no danger that I do not know as LID what I do as NID or vice
versa.

Chris
 
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