Users Home Folder and Network Drive

[lovelldr]

Hi guys.

I know I've got another thread that I just posted, but this is something different, so hence a new topic. If a mod wants to delete/merge, then that's fine

Anyway, I've been setting up my users on the server, and I noticed a strange anomoly with this. What I have is a folder on the server called users, and within this, a folder for students and a folder for staff. Within these, are each of the individual logins accts. I have shared the folder called users as "Users$".

When creating the logins, in the "Home Folder", I have created it as so:

\\SERVER\Users$\Students\USERNAME
\\SERVER\Users$\Staff\USERNAME

Now, this works perfectly fine for my folder redirection to My Documents, but I have selected it so that it creates the home drive to "Y:". Now, when I log on as a user, and go to the Y drive, it loads up just the Users$ share. So I can view all of the Students and Staffs home folders. But if I click on My Documents, I can only see the home folder for that particular login.

For the admin home folder, I created the share as admin$, and the home folder as "\\SERVER\admin$". This works perfectly fine for the Y: drive (dunno about My Docs folder redirection, as haven't set that up for admin).

So is there something simple I haven't set up correctly? Or is there something more to it than that? Or do I have to manually create a share for each user, and then assign that share in the home folder path?

Many thanks for all help input

David

[Geoff]

Presumably your using the 'home drive' mapping in the users properties in Active Directory? I think you would be better to create a login script and use the 'net use' commands to map your Y: drive.

[ChrisH]

@lovelldr

That should work as I have a similar setup except mine use z: drive. I would check the entry in AD. Did you create the name in the path manually or did you use %username%. I would check permissions as well but I doubt it is that.

[lovelldr]

@lovelldr

That should work as I have a similar setup except mine use z: drive. I would check the entry in AD. Did you create the name in the path manually or did you use %username%. I would check permissions as well but I doubt it is that.

I have put the name in the path manually. But I then tried creating a new user and putting the name in using %username%. Still does the same.

Are there any advantages/disadvantages to not setting a home?

Cus I am thinking of creating a share via the login script as mentioned by Geoff, and just redirecting the My Documents to the actual path, rather than choosing the "Redirect to the user's home directory" option.

But obviously I would prefer to have a home directory set. Just can't understand why it doesn't work. Unless I've changed something in the GPO which has messed it up? But wouldn't have thought so?

[plock]

I have seen similar issues in the past; previously it has been the synchronisation that has caused this.

Don't ask me why!?! Try going to Tools > Folder Options > Offline Files > then by holding down 'Shift', 'Control' and selecting 'Delete Files'. This then resets the cache and sorted the issue.

Let me know if this works for you.

[TimH]

If you set up permissions in your share correctly, you can use folder redirection to set users' "My Documents" and the system will create the actual folder in the share at first logon.

Because some old software insists on drive letters, I then map "M:" to the Mydocs location via logon script.

This way no user needs to have their homedir specified in the AD.

I also have folder redirection specified by DFS path - \\ourdomain\students\2007 - makes sitching to a backup server a trivial tweak of DFS.

[lovelldr]

OK, just for anyone else who might come accross the same problem in the future, I've found out what the problem was.

I should've tried this before on Friday, but it was just one of those days. This morning, I came in and decided I'd gotta sort, and so I disabled the GPO, lo and behold, it worked properly. So I knew it was something within the GPO which was causing it.

So I took a quick look through the GPO, and noticed that under:

User Config -> Admin Templates -> System -> User Profiles

I'd got the "Connect home directory to root of the share" enabled. Doh! Dunno why that got enabled. Think it must've been a long day reading through the GPO options! Just hope I didn't enabled something else!

Anyway, all working fine and dandy as it should now

Cheers for any help guys.