PROFILES and SYNCHRONIZATION - Keeping logon times down?

[Sam_Brown]

Morning guys,

I was just wondering what different stratergies people use to try and keep log on times down at their schools? We are currently using roaming profiles and offline folders for their home area. Years ago this was fine and worked well.

HOWEVER over the last few years we've seen profiles start to get larger and larger as well as teachers starting to work more with multimedia files like videos and music. End result of this is having user profiles that are often many gig in size taking the users sometimes upto 20 minutes to log on and off. With the home areas often containing videos and large collections of music it also means if a teacher logs on to a laptop for the first time it can take a long time for the initial synchronization of their home area to complete. In one instance with one of the drama teachers it took her almost 5 hours for all her video evidence files to be sync'd fully.

As we're pushing out new laptops to a fair few staff it's starting to become a big issue with logon times and initial sync times.

I was just wondering how do other schools set up their systems with regards to profiles and their home areas on laptops in order to try and keep logon times down?

Ideally I'd get rid of all the bloddy laptops and just stick a fat client in each room connected to the projector but seeing as how engrained the laptops are in the school that's not going to happen!

[jamesreedersmith]

No profiles, redirect desktop, startmenu, favourites and my docs. Logons will fly!

[zag]

We also removed profiles completely recently.

Our logins are now about 8 seconds from start to finish (on laptop ssd clients).

Favourites are stored in my documents and linked with a script.

Desktop and start menu stored on a central server and linked with group policy.

I see no reason for roaming profiles or even mandatory these days.

[Sam_Brown]

I know very little about profiles so excuse my ignorance. Don't a lot of programs require data to be stored in the "app data" area of the users profile? Wouldn't not having a profile cause some issues with with either users having to change settings for various programs every time they log in or some programs failing to run because there is no where to save certain files?

[zag]

I know very little about profiles so excuse my ignorance. Don't a lot of programs require data to be stored in the "app data" area of the users profile? Wouldn't not having a profile cause some issues with with either users having to change settings for various programs every time they log in or some programs failing to run because there is no where to save certain files?

The user still has a profile. Its just stored on the local client (not copied from the server).

If the user logs onto another machine they just get the basic profile again.

The only problem I have really is students clicking through the acrobat reader splash screen. Its a small annoyance to them really.

[MrWu]

Thats not a bad idea actually.

We are planning converting teachers from roaming to local too

Gather the best way then:

Convert their roaming profile to local on thier PC
Take out the profile entry in AD
Create a GPO for folder redirection of desktop,my docs etc,copy existing data there
I gather Outlook 2007 onwards uses autodiscover with Exchange, so user gets outlook setup anyway.

Interesting with the link up with the script for favourites, how is that done.

Cheers

[zag]

There are loads of scripts to redirect favorites posted on this forum.


Redirecting Favorites Problem

[Iain.Faulkner]

Just stumbled across this thread and it's intrigued me.

Those of you who have got rid of roaming profiles, what exactly did you do?

We have roaming profiles currently, but we already have in place start menu and desktop redirection, but we're experiencing quite horrendous logon times so anything I can do to reduce these has to be considered.

[jamesbrown]

Use Folder Redirection, It doesn't give slow logon times, plus you can choose what to redirect. You don't need to have synchronisation set up either.

I would avoid using local profiles incase the computer dies.

[gshaw]

For those with scripts for Favorites is that for XP on 7?

Thought 7 had all that pretty much sorted now? We've got folder redirection on with My Documents, Desktop etc at the moment but Appdata \ roaming profilles is a bit of a mess... going to 7 should sort that out though (but will probably create a whole new set of problems instead )

[zag]

Just stumbled across this thread and it's intrigued me.

Those of you who have got rid of roaming profiles, what exactly did you do?

We have roaming profiles currently, but we already have in place start menu and desktop redirection, but we're experiencing quite horrendous logon times so anything I can do to reduce these has to be considered.

Just remove the link in AD to account >> profiles.

Image1.jpg

This is one of our old student mandatory profiles.Removing the link in the red box and the logins are much quicker.

Yet to find a downside to it so far other than having to confirm their name when they launch Microsoft office. Also rememeber we use SSD so there is a huge improvement in login times as the default profile takes a few seconds to create on the local disk.

[cscott]

We use romain profiles but make heavy use of folder redirection.

We've got the users documents, desktop pictures, downloads, music, and favourites redirected to their home file share.

The AppData folder is also redirected, but to a dedicated file share, this folder can get big, no reason for users to ver access it's contents which is why we directed them to seperate fileshare - and we don't bother backing them up.

Once all the redirection is in place average profile is 5-6MB which should only take 20-30 seconds to download when the user logs on - however they still do bloat over time, either naturally or though people saving files in wrong location (we had someone who dropped a 6GB vhd file into their profile then complained it took them 20 minutes to login...).

Even with all the redirection in place we used to get complaints about long login times and everytime we investigated we found it was caused by profile bloat, to counter this I wrote a script that loops through all the roaming profiles in the file share and renames any that have grown larger then 10MB. Next time the user logs on new profile gets generated, as the appdata is redirected it's very rare that anyone notices this has been done. Since put this in place we haven't had a single complaint about long log in times.