Downsides of pupils not having profile (man or roaming)

[andyrite]

Surely with local profiles you get hard disks filling up with all the individual profiles stored on there??

 

Own up…. who mentioned that terrifying phrase “local profiles!” that would be just insane….. or dare I say it suicidal!

 

Some people would say that about roaming profiles!

 

You can use folder redirection for the favorites folder. I've just stuck a favorites folder in there home drive.

 

Delprof deletes the profiles off the disc when the pc boots up.

[djm968]

Some people would say that about roaming profiles!

 

Quite right.... that's why I would never recommend implementing them.

[Dos_Box]

Surely with local profiles you get hard disks filling up with all the individual profiles stored on there??

 

Not really. Delprof will delete them when instigated via a logoff script and folder re-direction places everything firmly in their user areas.

[MkII]

Well I suppose the application data makes up the bulk of it, and that's easily re-directed. What makes my staff logins slow though, is the first login to a machine, all that local data being created. So presumably that's the effect with local profiles vs mandatory - the long wait???

[Halfmad]

For kids a vanilla profile means a different setup on every PC they visit. Surely a bad thing.

 

It's the way I do it, generally the desktops are similar (we force down a desktop picture so it at least looks similar).

 

Applications vary on each desktop but generally will be MS office + a few basic standard apps.

 

my documents is redirected

 

 

Fact is, in real life and in organisations they'll find different desktops and setups where ever they work.

 

Major downside - it can eat up HDD space, especially on older Dells with Windows 2000.

[Ryan]

Hello all. Long time lurker, first time poster

 

This discussion is interesting. We currently use roaming profiles and they've started to get a bit weighty and problematic, the two may be related.

 

We have problems with pupils missing files, work not being saved or propagating properly etc etc. After having a dig about on the web, i tried implementing folder redirection on their My Docs and Desktop to cut down on the constant copying when they log on all over the place.

 

This was my first foray into using redirection and, sod's law, we started getting some weird behaviour. The PCs, when logged off, now insist on synchronising everything with the server, and the little blue synchronising icons on everything were confusing people. Is this normal when using folder redirection? (the synchronisation i mean) I assumed that it'd work like a mapped network drive. We don't need offline files, desktops only.

 

Suffice to say, i've turned redirection off and defaulted the redirection, recreated the pupils' profiles and accounts. Sadly though, the PCs still insist on synchronising files. I've since trawled through GP and shut down all possibility of offline files/synchronising, yet it still happens. Driving me nuts.

 

Hope that all makes sense. I guess what i'm looking for is an easily maintained, idiot-proof solution (for them and me!) to our little situation. Any ideas shall be met with cookies / a furious batting of eyelashes / some cleavage, whatever floats your boats.

[sahmeepee]

It can be annoying trying to get offline files to go away once it's got its claws in. One thing you could try as a tester is the csccmd (client side caching command) commandline tool.

 

There is a jazzy 1.1 version which does all sorts of stuff:

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/884739

 

but XP comes with a basic version 1.0. From your XP cmdline, try running

 

csccmd /disable

 

If it's already disabled you'll get:

 

ERROR:: CSC is not enabled on this machine.

 

at the bottom of the output. If you have luck with that, scripting may be the next step...

 

Hope that all makes sense. I guess what i'm looking for is an easily maintained, idiot-proof solution (for them and me!) to our little situation. Any ideas shall be met with cookies / a furious batting of eyelashes / some cleavage, whatever floats your boats.

 

If you're really called Ryan and you do have cleavage, please keep it under wraps!

[Michael]

I use a mandatory roaming profile for pupils and give each teacher their own roaming profiles. It's always worked well, however it's good to see the different methods being used.

 

Roaming profiles can be controlled by Group Policy, so there are ways to control its size. In saying that though, I'm working at one school at the moment and one user has a roaming profile which is 463MB and that's over wireless. It was slow logging on to say the least!

 

I'll be a hero when I fix this tomorrow!

[Guest frances]

The school I am at uses mandatory profiles for the kids without too many problems. There are complaints from kids that they can't pick their wallpaper, but that's tough. The only problem have been with visually impaired children needing different settings and that has been dealt with by having a seperate manatory profile for visually impaired kids.

[cookie_monster]

We use folder redirection here which is great and a default profile in the netlogon share on each DC. The default profile is only 1.5 meg so it really doesn't cause any traffic issues, this contains our application settings and can be updated easily.

[Ryan]

If you're really called Ryan and you do have cleavage, please keep it under wraps!

Not quite sure how to defend myself on that one, other than "i don't - honest!"

 

Ta for the linkypoo sahmeepee, i'll check it out in the morning.

 

The phrase that springs to mind when i experimented with redirection is "Pandora's box" - nowt but bloody trouble since!

 

Has anyone ever seen/got roaming profiles and folder redirection working properly, seamlessly and with few issues? Or is that the computing equivalent of a mermaid riding a unicorn?

[ZeroHour]

One thing you can do is change the offline file settings of the share your redirecting to.

Just go into the share properties in 2003 and you should find mention of offline file settings.

There is also a GPO setting that disables syncronising so users basically work with files hosted on the server.

[Ryan]

users basically work with files hosted on the server.

That's exactly how i saw it working. Gah. Never as simple as it seems though is it. Can forsee a testing session on the cards...

[azrael78]

One thing you can do is change the offline file settings of the share your redirecting to.

Just go into the share properties in 2003 and you should find mention of offline file settings.

There is also a GPO setting that disables syncronising so users basically work with files hosted on the server.

 

Just to expand on this a little - if you want Offline Files gone (or to never return) - ensure that caching is disabled on shares on the server.

 

Set GPOs so that offline files are disabled at the machine and user level (this may or may not be important, but we have multiple forests so for us we set it in both places just to make damned sure it doesn't come back).

 

As for us... we use a super mandatory profile for the kids, start menu redirection (but not desktop), my documents redirection and a very thorough logon script. We also have various other scripts and tools that handle problems (such as app specific settings in certain rooms) and one that may of interest - we have Office XP and 2003 - yet we use 1 icon for both - we have a script handle office versions for us.

 

Alot of our 'value-added' services (such as the background active-x wallpaper) have mostly been written in-house by yours truely (because as we know, schools hate spending money!).

 

If anyone has any questions or such about things - feel free to PM me, I check the forums almost daily

 

Az

[Ryan]

Just been through 'em all and done that, thanks. Hopefully it'll make a difference.

 

Something that's bothering me - i just created a spanking new (roaming btw) test account, logged into my test PC beside this one (to create the profile files), downloaded a pic to My Pics and set as background then logged off. I popped downstairs to a classroom and logged on, all fine - picture is in My Pics (no desktop picture though, grr).

 

The annoying bit: When logging off, it STILL tries to do a synch. i.e., the box pops up and goes through the process of synchronising "profiles$" folder - whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

[ZeroHour]

I assume the profiles share has caching settings setup correctly.

There is also a GPO setting that disables synchronising so users basically work with files hosted on the server.

The settings for offline files are under:

User config->Admin Templates->Network->Offline files

 

Have a look through them and you should be able to disable synchronise.

[DMcCoy]

If only I could do what I wanted with profiles :/

 

I want a mandatory profile stored on the server. I don't want it copied to the local machine each time users login as that takes ages, I'd rather it was run from the share like redirected folders.

 

Why not just use redirected folders? Well you need write permissions over application data and other areas so it's not going to work for multiple users.

[Ryan]

Ah, that's a cheeky little setting in there: "Don't automatically make redirected folders available offline." Now i know i suppose

 

Have disabled or otherwise killed everything in there relating to offline files. See if it goes away...