Roaming Profiles and multiple Sites

  • Thread starter Thread starter TimParker
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TimParker

Hello All. I have done a bit of scrounging around here looking for
some info and haven't quite found what I am looking for yet, so here I
am....

I work for a small Health Care provider. We currently have 2 offices
hooked up by a VPN across the internet. I have 2 DCs in my location
and the remote one has a DC for logons and such. We have some users
that work between the two locations and the solution before I got here
was to have two accounts one for each site because the logons were so
slow. Each pointed to the "local" DC for the profile.

They want to use roaming profiles as people can use multiple PCs
depending on which office they might be in at a site. I came up with
an idea while brainstorming with a friend to create a directory under \
\DC\netlogon\ so that it would be replicated between all the DCs and
put the profiles of these users in there.

I created a test account (small, new, empty profile) and the logon
times were fast and the data replicated just fine. I then migrated a
few others to test the speed and all, everything seemed fine.

I have now gotten reports from a couple of these users that they are
getting (at logon in their main location) the "can not update your
roaming profile" message. I also had a user that was on site her today
that some of her mapped drives were not there. After I went back and
looked at the log on script -- it turns out the ones that were missing
were for the server at the remote location to where she was. I would
have thought that even if they weren't connected they would at least
show up under my computer and they didn't.

when I migrated these couple of accounts, their data replicated
between the two local DCs to me here and then I could see it show up
on the remote one so replication seems fine. I am not expecting it to
be lightening. As no one would log into something and then normally
log into something in the other location until at least 35-45 minutes
later (driving time between the two locations) After the initial
replication smaller changes should be much quicker anyway as it would
just be changing small stuff so this shouldn't be an issue.

Here are the old and new strings.

Old Roaming profile string:
\\DC\users\username

New Roaming profile string:
\\%LOGONSERVER%\NETLOGON\PROFILE-TEST\%USERNAME%\

I think I have given all the pertinent info, I am currently scheduling
to roll these users back to the old way so they don't loose profile
data. Sometimes they see errors and get worried. I just want this to
work well for them. Thoughts, ideas, pointers to sites; whitepapers
etc?

TIA.

Tim
 
something else to add that I just thought of, not sure if this has
anything to do with it but...

when I created the directory for these shares profile-test I didn't
give any special permissions there.
But on the user directories inside I make sure they have Full Control.
Do they need special rights on the
container that actually holds the user folder? So it would be one
level up? I doubt it but....
 
Hello TimParker,

Do you use Group Policy slow link detection? Set it to Disabled at Computer
Configuration / Administrative Templates / System / Group Policy.

Ofcourse you can use the netlogon folder for this, but i would prefer a DFS
share for storing the profiles share. Normally you use the netlogon folder
for administrative tasks, scripts etc. User data better store on different
place.

Best regards

Meinolf Weber
Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers
no rights.
** Please do NOT email, only reply to Newsgroups
** HELP us help YOU!!! http://www.blakjak.demon.co.uk/mul_crss.htm
 
Not sure I follow the slow link detection idea?!?! The concept here is
to have
the user using their local DC (%LOGONSERVER%) so that they don't have
to
go across the wan link. The only time they would HAVE to go across it
is if
all DCs in their local site are DOWN (should never happen).

I haven't used DFS for anything as of yet. Will/can this replicate
between the two
sites/DCs? I will try and read up on this and see if it might help
me.

Thanks for the help so far, hopefully I can find a complete answer!

Tim
 
Hello TimParker,

Here some about DFS:
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windo...f865-4200-9ae9-66785e5e87c81033.mspx?mfr=true

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windo...1634-4da6-b820-537341d349061033.mspx?mfr=true

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/storage/dfs/default.mspx

Best regards

Meinolf Weber
Disclaimer: This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers
no rights.
** Please do NOT email, only reply to Newsgroups
** HELP us help YOU!!! http://www.blakjak.demon.co.uk/mul_crss.htm
 
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