Roaming Profiles

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Im having a huge problem with roaming profiles in Windows 2000 server sp4
environment. The setup is only one DC and the roaming profiles are located
on that server within a share called "home". My problem is some users, not
all- when they log in there settings are not replicated, such as default
printers, but as a result we have an as400 emulator on all the client pc
which are Windows 2000 sp4 machines as well, that when they use the program
it is set up for using windows user name and passwords to log in. Now the
clients that are having problems with replicating their profiles and settings
are under the same OU in AD and there is no special scripts or anything, they
all have the same user permissions. My temporary fix has been to delete the
user in AD, rename their old "Home" folder to "userold", recreate the user,
log in to the appropriate workstation, then log off copy over all their
folders from the "userold" in the "Home" directory, I keep the Ntuser.dat,
ini and pol intact. Then re login at that workstation and the user will have
the same rights and privileges as before the settings and access were lost, I
also should mention that I do not keep local cache When they logoff it gets
saved to the DC then deletes on the workstation. I need to know what I may
be doing wrong, I cannot keep doing this, and I cannot pinpoint the problem
because as I mentioned before I have all the users in the same OU and there
is nothing special between users in that OU. Please forgive my English, it
is not so well. Thank You for help in advance.
 
Ryan said:
Im having a huge problem with roaming profiles in Windows 2000 server sp4
environment. The setup is only one DC and the roaming profiles are located
on that server within a share called "home". My problem is some users, not
all- when they log in there settings are not replicated, such as default
printers, but as a result we have an as400 emulator on all the client pc
which are Windows 2000 sp4 machines as well, that when they use the program
it is set up for using windows user name and passwords to log in. Now the
clients that are having problems with replicating their profiles and settings
are under the same OU in AD and there is no special scripts or anything, they
all have the same user permissions. My temporary fix has been to delete the
user in AD, rename their old "Home" folder to "userold", recreate the user,
log in to the appropriate workstation, then log off copy over all their
folders from the "userold" in the "Home" directory, I keep the Ntuser.dat,
ini and pol intact. Then re login at that workstation and the user will have
the same rights and privileges as before the settings and access were lost, I
also should mention that I do not keep local cache When they logoff it gets
saved to the DC then deletes on the workstation. I need to know what I may
be doing wrong, I cannot keep doing this, and I cannot pinpoint the problem
because as I mentioned before I have all the users in the same OU and there
is nothing special between users in that OU. Please forgive my English, it
is not so well. Thank You for help in advance.
Click to expand...

I don't know why your roaming profiles fail to replicate, but your
technique would seem to be unbearably slow as far as logons and logoffs
go if you delete the local profile every time your users logoff. A
suggestion might be to redirect My Documents to the server, and use a
wsh script at logon to assign printers based on the user logging on. If
you need the printers to be assigned by computer location, you can use
loopback policy or just make the logon script check for the computername
and assign printers based on that. There are a multitude of ways to
handle this, but copying profiles back and forth is got to be at the
bottom of the list.

....kurt
 
Well the reason for roaming profiles is that at night when everyone is logged
off I use the backup tape to backup the home directories to keep everything
intact. But I am still having issues with random users losing settings when
they logon, and there is nothing that is consistant that I can use to
pinpoint the problem. I reinstalled the server and client machines to see if
that would fix, it did not.
 
Hi Ryan,

With redirected folders everything will remain on the server so you can back
it up as usual. I agree with Kurt, constantly removing the profile from the
workstation will task your network in the morning when everyone logs in and
every single file gets copied to the workstations. At least with redirected
folders, only the files they need to access will be pulled over the wire.

At times I've seen flaky issues with roaming profiles in our network. Do you
see any errors in the event log on the clients?

Did you disable caching for the share that house those profiles?

Denny
 
Ok it seems that I will try to roll out the folder redirection beginning next
week. I did disable the cache for the shares. But roaming profiles seems
flaky within itself. Thank you Kurt and Denny for your help
 
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