Large Number of Profiles...Automatic maintenance???

  • Thread starter Thread starter JoeVolcano
  • Start date Start date
J

JoeVolcano

I run an internet cafe. We use 2003 server with XP clients. Using
roaming profiles is a great feature for cafe visitors to have, when
they come back thier info is "there".

The issue is that we have a small number of computers, but a LARGE
number of AD users. We recently discoverd that our performance woes
were due to the copied profiles were filling up the disks on the client
machines. We had 600-800 profiles on the machines!

Is there any way to automatically remove profiles? I realize I can
write a script to remove "old" profiles (anyone got this already
written?)
It took us a couple of hours/machine to remove all the profiles and
start again.

Login/Logout is still slow with roaming profiles, we DO have AD
integrated, DNS and name resolution is working, 100Mbit network (full
duplex!) still takes >1-2minutes on an xp machine with 256M ram (933Mhz
cpu). Faster machines do perfrom better...why would this be compute
intensive??? any ideas?

Thanks again,

Geoff
 
RE: disk space being used by local copies of roaming profiles: You can
force local copies of the roaming profiles to be deleted with Group Policy:

Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/System/Logon - Delete cached
copies of roaming profiles.

RE: slow logon issue, there are several possible causes - one that you might
not have considered is fragmentation. Any machine that has had 600 profiles
deleted is likely to need defragging.

Doug Sherman
MCSE Win2k/NT4.0, MCSA, MCP+I, MVP
 
JoeVolcano said:
I run an internet cafe. We use 2003 server with XP clients. Using
roaming profiles is a great feature for cafe visitors to have, when
they come back thier info is "there".

The issue is that we have a small number of computers, but a LARGE
number of AD users. We recently discoverd that our performance woes
were due to the copied profiles were filling up the disks on the client
machines. We had 600-800 profiles on the machines!

Is there any way to automatically remove profiles? I realize I can
write a script to remove "old" profiles (anyone got this already
written?)
It took us a couple of hours/machine to remove all the profiles and
start again.

Login/Logout is still slow with roaming profiles, we DO have AD
integrated, DNS and name resolution is working, 100Mbit network (full
duplex!) still takes >1-2minutes on an xp machine with 256M ram (933Mhz
cpu). Faster machines do perfrom better...why would this be compute
intensive??? any ideas?

Thanks again,

Geoff
Click to expand...

You could use this batch file to delete unused profile folders:

L1 @echo off
L2 set AgeLimit=90
L3 pushd "c:\Documents and Settings"
L4 for /d %%a in (*.*) do forfiles.exe -p"%%a" -m"ntuser.dat" -c"cmd /c echo
@FILE" -d-%AgeLimit% | find /i "ntuser.dat"> nul && echo rd /s /q "%%a"
L5 popd

Unwrap the long line and remove the line numbers before running
the batch file. Remove the "echo" command in order to activate
the script.

forfiles.exe comes with the Win2000 Resource Kit. xxcopy.exe
is another tool that can be used to remove old files and folders.
Use Google to find download sites.
 
Hi Doug,

Thanks for the tip -- We're running 2003 server -- I didn't see this in
our group policy. I DID find a policy " At logog, delete local copy of
users offline files" but it looks like this policy won't synchronize
first (ARG).
This was in Computer Configuration/Administrative
Templates/System/Network/Offline Files
any other suggestions? Is the policy you found in the domain?

Thanks!
 
Perhaps as well as removing old profiles you could limit the size of
existing profiles? This would increase disk space and increase logon times
for people who would otherwise have particularly large profiles.

GPO\User Configuration\Administrative Template\System\Logon/Logoff\Limit
profile size

This is a nice feature to use as it activates a small app that sits in the
task bar watching the profile size, and warning the user when they exceed
their limit. It also shows them the offending files so they can move/delete
them as appropriate.

Paul.
 
Will that protect the Administrator, Default User, and AllUsers profiles
from being deleted?
 
No, this would need extra code.


Phillip Windell said:
Will that protect the Administrator, Default User, and AllUsers profiles
from being deleted?

--

Phillip Windell [MCP, MVP, CCNA]
www.wandtv.com

Pegasus (MVP) said:
You could use this batch file to delete unused profile folders:

L1 @echo off
L2 set AgeLimit=90
L3 pushd "c:\Documents and Settings"
L4 for /d %%a in (*.*) do forfiles.exe -p"%%a" -m"ntuser.dat" -c"cmd /c echo
@FILE" -d-%AgeLimit% | find /i "ntuser.dat"> nul && echo rd /s /q "%%a"
L5 popd
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
 
I discovered a tool - delprof.exe that removed profiles!

Now I have a scheduled task that runs daily that removes profiles over
14 days old. This reduces the burden on the systems and allows frequent
visitors to keep thier profiles on a machine.
Delprof is downloadable from Microsofts site.
 
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