User has no icons

[Little-Miss]

Do yours do that everytime Elsie?

[Michael]

You should be EXTREMELY careful including delprof or any script based methods of deleting profiles at logoff. Remember teachers may typically logon to their laptops on the domain, and this would delete their local profile and their documents!

[Little-Miss]

Yup, was aware of that!

 

I've done it by OU, and at the mo none of the laptops are on the domain but when they are they will go into their own OU and i shall be very careful where i apply the script!!

[Little-Miss]

Am i better doing this manually when there is a problem or what? If so that sucks

[Michael]

I would do it manually as and when required. I wouldn't recommend scripting it. You're then in full control.

[witch]

I would do it manually as and when required. I wouldn't recommend scripting it. You're then in full control.

 

Actually, so would I - it shouldn't be a problem too often, and you don't have that many machines anyway, do you?

 

Thinking about it, I don't use it in my current jobs but in my last one it was set as start-up, as elsiegee said., not log on or off

[Little-Miss]

hmm, getting close to 100 machines, not including staff laptops but does include the netbooks but they dont belong to a single person.

 

Well ive currently only deployed the script to the couple of machines in my room so i could keep an eye on them. Maybe i should just stick to manual...

[elsiegee40]

Do yours do that everytime Elsie?

Profile corruption is inconsistent and I can go months without it happening here. Having googled about this problem, although not recently, it appears that it is the same everywhere It is simply observation over time that has led to my conclusion that multiple logons don't help. As for my profile, I have no idea why it corrupted the other morning... I obviously forgot to pray to the correct deity that morning!

 

You should be EXTREMELY careful including delprof or any script based methods of deleting profiles at logoff. Remember teachers may typically logon to their laptops on the domain, and this would delete their local profile and their documents!

Michael is of course right. Thanks to careful use of AD OUs, delprof is only used on desktops (not laptops) and is never used on the office PCs.

 

The office users only use the PC on their desk and don't logon to multile machines, so I've never had a profile corruption with these people... (Famous last words!)

[mossj]

I wouldn't simply because our 'typical' user will try on around 5 or 6 computers in 2 or 3 different areas and just forget where she did this.

 

The dirty profile will then just hang around until it finds her again.

 

Maybe you could just activate it for the afternoon/morning after someone reports a corupt profile? (Apply the gpo and shutdown all the pc's at night it will ensure it's run on startup in the morning, you can then remove the gpo again), you could even go as far as only activating it in the rooms that have issues.

 

and/or

 

Modify the script so you can add the username of the profile you want deleted? and just leave that active for 24 hours?

[Little-Miss]

Oh, good ideas Mossj...i like it...

 

Happened again, on the pc i have opposite me (which has the script applied) User logged on, no background no icons. She'd tried to log off and it hung. so i rebooted the PC and it worked fine. Starting to get annoyed with this profile thing!

[mossj]

Oh, good ideas Mossj...i like it...

 

Happened again, on the pc i have opposite me (which has the script applied) User logged on, no background no icons. She'd tried to log off and it hung. so i rebooted the PC and it worked fine. Starting to get annoyed with this profile thing!

 

Maybe you should think about Mandatory Profiles before your network gets bigger. I don't think they suffer from the same issues....

[SpuffMonkey]

We get mess when people get to a PC that is locked and just switch it off and on so they can login - leaving a local profile that then gets in the way when the original user logs in on that PC again - irritating - but can't find a solution - its a people thing not a computer one.

[Michael]

For pupils I usually set them up with a single, pre-configured mandatory profile. From Year 2 upwards they have their own individual logon names. This allows teachers to monitor pupil progress and over time, pupils have a portfolio of work when they leave in Year 6 to secondary school.

 

Staff on the other hand usually have their own profiles, but again, pre-configured by myself to minimise problems.

 

If by chance a user profile becomes corrupt (for whatever reason), the really simple solution is to give the new profile a unique name, such as "jbloggs1", "jbloggs2" within Active Directory. Naming the profile differently will ignore the existing old profile (possibly cached on workstations), which was named just "jbloggs".

 

You'll also find inevitably that workstations will require re-imaging due to corruption or users incorrectly shutting down machines, so in the process cached profiles will be deleted anyway.

[mossj]

If by chance a user profile becomes corrupt (for whatever reason), the really simple solution is to give the new profile a unique name, such as "jbloggs1", "jbloggs2" within Active Directory. Naming the profile differently will ignore the existing old profile (possibly cached on workstations), which was named just "jbloggs".

 

Are you sure this would work as profiles under document and settings are saved under our usernames....

 

E.G when I logon my profile folder on the machine is "mossj", but on the server it is "mossjPROFILE"

 

For pupils I usually set them up with a single, pre-configured mandatory profile. From Year 2 upwards they have their own individual logon names. This allows teachers to monitor pupil progress and over time, pupils have a portfolio of work when they leave in Year 6 to secondary school.

 

who was talking about logins/usernames?

 

from what I read/understand (on this forum) with a Madatory profile you can still have seperate logins but the users profile is always the same as a master copy, hence it cannot currupt...

 

http://www.edugeek.net/wiki/index.php/Mandatory_Profiles

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/windows/18661-creating-small-mandatory-profile.html

Edited September 17, 2009 by mossj

[Michael]

Are you sure this would work as profiles under document and settings are saved under our usernames....

 

Yes you can have usernames and profiles named differently.

 

My username could by jbloggs and my profile could be jbloggs1234, so this would read:

 

\\SERVERNAME\PROFILES$\jbloggs1234

 

My home directory would have to read (as a recommendation):

 

\\SERVERNAME\jbloggs$

[mossj]

Yes you can have usernames and profiles named differently.

 

My username could by jbloggs, my profile could be jbloggs1234, so this would read:

 

\\SERVERNAME\PROFILES$\jbloggs1234

 

My home directory would have to read (as a recommendation):

 

\\SERVERNAME\jbloggs$

 

Yes but we are not talking about on the server, we are talking local machine. Your profile on the local machine would still be "c:\documents and settings\jbloggs" or does it overwrite the existing locally saved profile?

Edited September 17, 2009 by mossj

[Little-Miss]

just so you know, staff roaming...kids mandatory...

[Michael]

the users profile is always the same as a master copy, hence it cannot currupt...

 

There are various methods to deploy/use, roaming/local, standard/mandatory profiles.

 

Yes but we are not talking about on the server

 

In a network environment the server usually plays a big role in profiles. Roaming profiles (for example) would be stored in a profiles$ share.

 

Within Active Directory if you changed the profile name from:

 

\\SERVERNAME\PROFILES$\jbloggs to

\\SERVERNAME\PROFILES$\jbloggs2

 

Then created/copied a profile within Profiles$ named jbloggs2, the computer you're logging onto would ignore existing profiles named jbloggs and download the new/updated profile named jbloggs2.

[witch]

Sorry Little-Miss, I didn't mean to imply that your network was small and insignificant, all I meant was that hopefully as the corruption doesnt happen often, and you don't have a school of 500-odd machines, you wouldnt come across it too often and so it wouldnt be such a big thing to delete the profiles manually occasionally!

However, you seem to have a bit of a bigger than usual problem. Did someone else set up the profiles?

I have looked at our system and one school definitely has delprof running when the computers shut down at night. This seems to help a bit.

[Little-Miss]

lol thats ok Witchy, i didnt take it that way.

 

The guy who helped with my new DC install set them up. They set up the same way Michael has mentioned. \\SERVERNAME\PROFILES$

 

im getting a little worried

[Little-Miss]

Just noticed another thread which pointed to this Hotfix...http://support.microsoft.com/kb/958058

 

our machines are service pack 3 and i made the staff get prompted to change there passwords. Just about to check to see if this fix has been applied.

[witch]

did the school pay for the install? If so it is his problem and he needs to come back and sort it! And the other problems you have been having

(can you hear the undertones? Just had our new server and it crashed constantly - was told it was MY switches - no it wasnt, it was the NOD trying to scan everyone as they logged on and causing all sorts of issues. They came and fixed it - eventually)

[mossj]

I moved jobs yesterday and the university I now work for has a interesting way of dealing with clearing profiles...

 

They give you a link to do it... Now I don't think that will work as if your profiles corrupt your not going to see the icon to do it but.....

 

if you could write a script that... lets a teach add a username to a text file with a date, shows a message box to make sure the kid is logged off, then clears there profile on the server.

 

Then you have a startup script that looks in the textfile for usernames where the appended date is no more than 3 days before, and then only deletes local profiles where the username exists.