Local mandatory profile \ cached logon

[gshaw]

Sounds odd but bear with me

We've got a set of netbooks going out into the Community - won't be any network connections out there but still need to look like our teaching machines. Wanted to avoid HDGuard \ SteadyState if I can help it so was hoping to set up something along the lines of...

- cached domain logons with generic machine logons
- GPOs set same as the rest of the networked machines (cached with RSoP as usual)
- set up a logon script to run locally to set anything that's usually done by GPO logon script
- local copy of the mandatory profile we use on the network

I remember someone on here ran their machines with profiles copied locally to save on network traffic. Question is, if I set the profile location in AD to say c:\profiles or similar will it still work when off the network?

[jsnetman]

We have laptops here that teachers rarely bring to school. We allocate a local default user profile and control everything by group policy including offline files, the proviso being they must logon at least once when on the network. There is not really a need to create a special local profile.

[gshaw]

We have laptops here that teachers rarely bring to school. We allocate a local default user profile and control everything by group policy including offline files, the proviso being they must logon at least once when on the network. There is not really a need to create a special local profile.

Depends, we have all the toolbars etc set up in a certain way for training, can't set those by GPO...

[jsnetman]

well they could be by registry entries, but yeah I see your point if you want a heavily tailored profile.

[ajbritton]

In theory, AFAIK, there's no rule that says a mandatory profile has to come from a network connection.

We used to use what we called a 'shared' profile, which was essentially a roaming profile stored on the C: drive. This was a rather crude method of giving the same settings to all users on that PC. We occasionally had problems with this approach, but we weren't setting the profile is mandatory, so you may be more successful.

[gshaw]

Just wanted to post my solution with this as it doesn't seem to appear anywhere on Google

• copy your network mandatory profile to USB stick
• create folder on local drive
• grant read access to Everyone group
• set ownership of folder \ files to local Administrators group
• go to AD and set profile path to C:\profile
• Enjoy!

Working perfectly at the moment, very very happy with this as it means we can have laptops off the domain with the exact same look and feel as domained ones with no HDD thrashing (Deepfreeze etc) or manual setup in sight

[ajbritton]

It would be a fairly simple matter to set up a 'startup' script which uses robocopy to update the local mandatory profile from a network location whenever the laptops are connected to the network. You could then maintain a central profile and have it pushed out automatically.

[gshaw]

The local profile works fine now but next problem is getting GPOs to "stick" when off the network... as it stands as soon as I login without a network cable plugged in the Start Menu reverts to normal, hidden drives start showing etc