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Local and Roaming Profiles

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by steven rosson

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Another installment in the "school network" series...

The consultant who set this whole thing up set all eighty students and twenty faculty members up with local profiles on our twenty-five computers. I am now trying to create roaming profiles for them (mandatory for the students) and am running into a bit of a problem. They seem to be taking the contents of the C:\Documents and Settings\Default\ profile and applying them to the roaming profile when the user logs on. The way this consultant set it up is he went to each computer, made the desktops and start menus look a certain way, and then set that as a default for the local computer (I guess.) So will I have to just delete the Default directory or is there another solution I am missing?

Another issue with profile - my Windows 2000 book discusses how to make roaming and mandatory profiles. But I am confused about creating the template for them - would I do that on the server or on a workstation? I'd appreciate some instructionson how to go about creating a roaming profile that already has customizations in it ... and if you have any suggestions or how I might go about taking the things that users have already done (like documents in their local profiles ... grrr ... ) andmoving them into the roaming profiles quickly and efficiently, I'd appreciate that as well. And lastly, I'd like the desktop and start menu to include some icons that can not be erased, but I'd still like it to be a roaming profile. How can I do this? Would folder redirection to a folder they have no write access on do the trick?

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by curlergirl

To set a default profile for all users in the domain, first create the default profile you want to use (on a workstation), and then copy that Default folder to the Netlogon share on your server. This will then act as the Default profile for ALL workstations that are part of the domain (it overrides that local Default profile folder). If you want to use a Mandatory default profile (no changes allowed), then rename the ntuser.dat file to ntuser.man. If you want the profiles to be roaming, theninstead of using the Netlogon share for the profile folder, create a set of roaming profile folders and copy the default profile to each of those folders. To customize the template (Default) profile, you need to log on to a workstation as a user, configure that user's desktop and settings for the programs and settings that you want, and then copy that profile to the Default folder (or to each user's roaming profile folder if you're using roaming profiles instead).

As far as copying what'salready in users' profiles, you can either (a) copy their local profile to their roaming folder and use that as their new roaming profile; or (b) create a batch file that automatically copies and moves certain types of files (i.e., files with a .docextension) to their roaming profile folder. One thing we've done in the past to minimize the time it takes to load roaming profiles is to use a group policy to prevent the "My Documents" folder from being copied as part of the profile. If you don't do this, then everything they put in that My Documents folder, from documents to shortcuts to .wav files and pictures, will be copied back to their roaming profile.

by curlergirl

Then, if you want to make sure their My Documents is available from any workstation, you can use group policies again to redirect their My Documents folder to a server location where it will always be available.

You can also exercise some controlover the Start menu and desktop using group policies, or you could put the elements you don't want to change in the All Users profile on the workstations and give them read only access to that profile folder. I've never tried it, but theoretically it should work. Hope this helps!

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