Creating a small mandatory profile

[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.

Edited June 18, 2008 by maniac

[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\CurrentVersion\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\CurrentVersion\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.

Edited June 18, 2008 by maniac

[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)

[bondbill2k2]

Revival of an old thread here but it seems to be the best mandatory profile discussion on here or at least that I've found besides the wiki. I'm currently redoing our students profiles on XP then will be looking at 7. Im at the stage of editing the registry hive as I've read a number of articles regarding reducing logon time by reducing the amount of registry changes needed from logon. What would you recommend clearing out as I don't want to go too spring clean happy! I havn't needed to make any real reg changes myself as desktops and my documents paths are set with GPO and app data isn't being saved anywhere other that local to save on storage. I'm also looking to disable the windows desktop search from loading up, it has the habbit of locking completly when users logoff but currently I have a near full registry hive in my mandatory student profiles!