Creating a small mandatory profile

[contink]

Just a thought but surely it'd be easier to redirect My Docs using the GPO assuming of course it's intended to be part of a domain

[Ryan]

All very useful stuff, thanks guys and gals.

I guess i'm gonna have to just bite the bullet and try this, do some testing, etc. Just trying to get a handle on it in my head before i do anything

Keep posting if you think of other handy tips...

[zag]

Recently we have been having alot of problems with corrupt roaming profiles and slow logons, on checking the roaming profiles, many users had over 30mb of settings information. Something had to be done!

So I followed the wiki guide and the above post by 'elsiegee40' and have to say it worked really well.

Logons are now fast, our default profile is 2.5mb now and it puts far less stress on the server. I've updated our scripts to load bginfo.exe and jsprint.exe and changed the userdrive using the active directory redirect.

All is working well so thanks for all the help. It took about 2hrs this afternoon to make the switch over for 1000 students.

Now to work out if I can do this for teachers as well

[apeo]

Walk through the registry and strip out everything that isn't neccessary (there's a whole load of junk in there)

Can you clarify on this...

[zag]

OK next question

How do people handle favorites? The mandatory profile doesnt let people save any favorites I would like to give them this facility, ideally it would save them in the users my documents in a folder called "favourites".

Cheers.

[amfony]

favourites - theres a script on the wiki that changes the location of favourites to a nominated drive.

[zag]

Thanks, found it here

Re-direct favourites to home drive

Any idea how I call the vbscript from my login.bat file?

[zag]

Just to follow up my post, I ended up using the ADM template from here

http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/g...s-via-GPO.aspx

Works well, but remember to change the filtering in gpedit to show all settings, and make the %username% instead of the userprofile if your using mandatory ones.

Thanks for all the help with this, I've reduced login times from about a minute to around 15 seconds Now all I need is a dedicated profile server with the 16gb SSD drive sitting on my desk to get it down to 5 seconds

[Osprey]

I edit the user hive in the mandatory profile so that
"HKey_users\nameofuserhive\Software\Microsoft\Wind ows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Favorites"
is set to u:\favourites where u: is the home directory. Note that I even use the English spelling!

[ahuxham]

Create it all, renamed from .dat to .man for the change.

Copy .man onto your machine, load as a hive into your registry, make all registry changes needed, add a few things as well if needed, unload hive, move .man into profile directory, re-map students profile paths.

Sorted.

[maniac]

The problems mentioned above with the profile remembering the home directory from the user it was created with is down to permissions within the user.man registry file. It's essential that you load the user.man file into regedit and ensure users can actually write to the sections that are needed. Remember the file permissions are different to the registry permissions within the file. Don't worry about doing this, the actual profile can't be changed by users as the network knows it's a mandatory pofile so it's never saved back to the server, it's only so scripts that are run at logon, and Group Policies can change necessary userkeys in the current_user part of the registry. I think you can also do this in the profiles section of system in control panel, but I normally load it into regedit manually as that's the way I was taught. Don't forget to unload it when you've finished making changes!

If you don't make this change, you can and probably will experience a lot of problems with group policies not applying properly, and scripts that write to the registry not doing as they're supposed to. While you're editing the file, you can also re-direct favourites to their home drive e.g. h:\favourites by editing the necessary registry key; the folder is automatically created if it doesn't exist when the user logs on.

Mike.

[imiddleton25]

I have been using mandatory profiles since NT4 days
I make sure the user i logon as to create the profile in a new user with no history on system. Make sure that the AD profiles, script and home folder is all blank. Log on as user then open Office applications,Acrobat ect as said at start of this post. Log off log on as admin go to profiles and copy local profile to the server\share for profiles remembering to change the permitted to use to include the group that will be using this profile.Rename NTuser.dat to NTuser.man . In AD enter the profile path script path and home folder details.
You can then assign it to all the users you need to have it.

[ahuxham]

While you're editing the file, you can also re-direct favourites to their home drive e.g. h:\favourites by editing the necessary registry key; the folder is automatically created if it doesn't exist when the user logs on.

Could you explain how this is done Mike, one of the downfalls is we feel students arent able to save favourites due to having mandatory profiles.

Specific registry key perhaps?

[maniac]

Take a copy of your user.man file and work on that. I do not recommend working on the live version as no users will be able to logon while you have the registry hive open!

1. load the user.man registry hive into Regedit, give it a name when asked, e.g for this example 'students' Note: You have select HKEY_USERS in order to get the option to load a registry hive in regedit.

2. navigate to the following key; 'HKEY_USERS\students\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Cu rrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders' Obviously substitute 'students' with whatever you called the registry hive when you loaded it.

3. You will see a string value called Favourites, probably with a default value of %USERPROFILE%\Favorites Change this to something like 'h:\favourites' (I don't recommend using unc paths or the %username% value as they don't seem to work for some reason) Obviously change H:\ for whatever your users' home drive is called.

4. There is also a second registry location 'HKEY_USERS\students\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Cu rrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders' with a string also called favourites which you can change as well. I can never remember which one windows actually uses, so change both for good measure, it doesn't appear to do any harm.

5. Unload the User.man file from regedit very important this bit, and quite often forgotten. Your profile will not work unless you remember to do this!

6. Test it! The users should get a directory called favourites on their H:\ (or whatever drive letter you used) and anything added to favourites in IE should appear in this directory.

Hope that's helpful.

Mike.

[pritchardavid]

So whats the best way of doing appdata with the mandatory profile?
After I made the mandatory profile (I did lanch every program to get all the appdata files made)

Now everytime I lanch for example serifi web plus I get 'Cant find c:\user\student\thewhatever'
I have even loaded the registry onto my computer and removed the word student from the registry (Done a search) and replaced it with %USERNAME%

Noe everytime I load serif webplus it says 'Cant find c:\user\%USERNAME%\thenwhatever'

This is just with documents and desktop redirected (Start Menu loads from the profile)