Bruce123 Posted January 24, 2011 Posted January 24, 2011 I just wondered how people create student account and how users home drives are structured on your network? We have historically created one share$ per user (for both staff and learners) and have the home drive (H: ) mapped directly to it. Permissions are set on the share level and the NTFS permissions are set to everyone full-control. The folder stucture is D:\shared\users\students\a..z \ useriD " " " " "\staff\a..z\ userID And these are stored on 4 fileservers (as we have 4 geographically dispersed sites connected together with WAN links). The servers are old Xenon based (P3 tech I think) Viglen servers which were purchased on 2003. After RAID they each have about 150Gb of storage on D:. We are looking to replace these servers and move existing staff/learners (and update the staff/student account genertion programs). We see this as a possible opportunity to change the way we stucture the H drive (use NTFS permissions and deep mapping of H drives to higher level share for staff and one for students). Both the student and staff account generation programs were developed "in house" using VB. The student account generation program connects to our MIS system an pulls off a list of enrolments, and generates the accounts from there. My questions is: A) What system do people use (one share per user or deep mapping)? B) What system do they use to autogenerate their student accounts? Any other advice? Thanks, Bruce.
Bruce123 Posted January 24, 2011 Author Posted January 24, 2011 I neglected to mention that we are an FE College, and tend to get enrolments throughout the year (maybe around 6,000 in an academic year, but only around 30% of these ever logon). I am not very up on this, but I imagine that many Schools use CC3 or CC4 linked into SIMS?
glennda Posted January 24, 2011 Posted January 24, 2011 Personally my system is Vanilla windows (ie no 3rd party software like cc3/4). We get a CSV file sent to us with the needed fields for AD then us Ad manager plus (although there are other free ones) to bulk import them into AD. We have given our Sims/Admissions lady the blank template and she puts in the necessary fields and emails to our helpdesk - one of the team then import into AD. All depends how bigger team you have. But in something like Ad Manager plus you could setup multiple templates with users Home dirs pointing to different servers then cycle through the different templates while importing. I'm not 100% sure if there is any 3rd party software which pulls from sims and can be imported into AD - although would be interested to know if their was.
clareq Posted January 24, 2011 Posted January 24, 2011 Neither CC3 or CC4 link directly to SIMS. We're on CC4, and, as above, we import a csv file exported from SIMS into the CC4 management console. I have, on a vanilla system, used various bat files to import users using Windows tools such as net user and cacls
qcomer Posted January 24, 2011 Posted January 24, 2011 Our student information system houses it's database in SQL. I have a nightly job that exports needed data to a .csv and then on the Domain Controller I have 2 vbs scripts. One for account creation and one for home creation. These are both run a scheduled tasks using the .Csv export and they generate a log for me also. Our directories are a single share and then deep mapping underneath that controlled by NTFS permissions rather than having a ton of shares.
glennda Posted January 24, 2011 Posted January 24, 2011 Also i wouldn't advise having every users homefolder as a share. In my experience this can really slow down servers. I simply use. \\server\staffdata$\username for staff data \\server\staffprofiles$\username for profiles \\server\intakeyear$\username for year group home dirs \\server\intakeyearprofiles$\username for year group profiles
qcomer Posted January 25, 2011 Posted January 25, 2011 Also i wouldn't advise having every users homefolder as a share. In my experience this can really slow down servers. I simply use. \\server\staffdata$\username for staff data \\server\staffprofiles$\username for profiles \\server\intakeyear$\username for year group home dirs \\server\intakeyearprofiles$\username for year group profiles Agreed. We have something similar minus the profiles path. All of our profiles are configured using default user on the local machines. Lots of shares on a machine tends to slow things down. Create one share (two if you must.) and then use NTFS permissions to lock them down. You can get a lot more variables using NTFS permissions also.
zag Posted January 25, 2011 Posted January 25, 2011 I'm just moving away from using hidden shares for individual user areas and its has speeded up the servers no end, especially on backup. If its an individual account just copy another account in AD and set a new name. AD will setup the user directory and create a home folder and set all the permssions first time they log on (assuming you dont use a $ share). If its for a batch upload you can use tools like dovestones AD bulk users, although it is rather complicated to use for the first time. You can also do what you require with vb scripts.
sted Posted January 25, 2011 Posted January 25, 2011 if you plan to go win 7 at any point and you are starting from scratch it might be worth doing your users \\server\users$\group\username\docs \\server\users$\group\username\pics \\server\users$\group\username\music .... as thats how it expects it to be and its not a major issue to redirect xp in the same way. This also gets round the my documents list rather than usernames you get when a user is logged onto a win7 box. individual $ shares per user is a pain but if you have a script t share them its not that bad creating new users i have an excel sheet if im doing lots or just copy an existing user if im only doing <10
jimmy_2k Posted January 25, 2011 Posted January 25, 2011 We had drive mapping issues with Server2003 in a previous place. What we did is changed the share mappings from \\server01\userfiles$\username to the FQDN like this \\server01.mynetwork.net\userfiles$\username
glennda Posted January 25, 2011 Posted January 25, 2011 We had drive mapping issues with Server2003 in a previous place. What we did is changed the share mappings from \\server01\userfiles$\username to the FQDN like this \\server01.mynetwork.net\userfiles$\username That just sounds like a DNS problem tbh
pete Posted January 25, 2011 Posted January 25, 2011 \\server\entryyearshare\%username% \\server\staffshare\%username% We just feed dsadd a csv for new users.
webman Posted January 25, 2011 Posted January 25, 2011 Also i wouldn't advise having every users homefolder as a share. In my experience this can really slow down servers. Lots of shares on a machine tends to slow things down. Do you have any benchmarks or information to back this up? We run CC3 and are soon to upgrade to CC4. Both networks have per-user (hidden) shares and we don't notice any difference compared to other servers.
glennda Posted January 25, 2011 Posted January 25, 2011 Do you have any benchmarks or information to back this up? We run CC3 and are soon to upgrade to CC4. Both networks have per-user (hidden) shares and we don't notice any difference compared to other servers. No evidence (as in websites explaining it) but i had a server which had around 1000 shares on it at my last place - whereas when we removed the data from it. and setup all the folders under \\server\datashare$\username was alot quicker (same install of windows on same hardware). Was just something I wouldn't personally do from what i have seen before. Having \\server\share$\username
zag Posted January 25, 2011 Posted January 25, 2011 Yes similar experience here, I remember reading something on the backupexec site about poor performance with multiple hidden shares in windows. Probably fixed with server 2008 though. Setting up backupexec jobs is certainly slower because it searches all the hidden shares each time. I've been setting up mainuserdatafolder$/username homedirs for a while now instead of userdata/username$ and its a noticeable speed increase when browsing the root folder. I wouldn't go back, put it that way.
Earthling Posted January 25, 2011 Posted January 25, 2011 \\server\staffdata$\username for staff data \\server\staffprofiles$\username for profiles \\server\intakeyear$\username for year group home dirs \\server\intakeyearprofiles$\username for year group profiles Almost exactly what we have here, (except the shares aren't hidden, and slightly different names) with profiles on one server and userdata on another. And we use csvde to import the new September intake every year. Casual admissions are done manually. That's on a vanilla 2003 & XP network. What do other schools/techs do about/with casual leavers and Yr 11 &13 Leavers? There's no protocol in place here to inform us of leavers of any kind. I'm beginning to think that the rest of the staff think we have retractable RJ45 plugs on our fingers that we plug into the network to find out these things.....you know, like R2D2 plugging in to the Death Star to shut down the rubbish compressor things.
Bruce123 Posted January 29, 2011 Author Posted January 29, 2011 (edited) Almost exactly what we have here, (except the shares aren't hidden, and slightly different names) with profiles on one server and userdata on another. And we use csvde to import the new September intake every year. Casual admissions are done manually. That's on a vanilla 2003 & XP network. What do other schools/techs do about/with casual leavers and Yr 11 &13 Leavers? There's no protocol in place here to inform us of leavers of any kind. I'm beginning to think that the rest of the staff think we have retractable RJ45 plugs on our fingers that we plug into the network to find out these things.....you know, like R2D2 plugging in to the Death Star to shut down the rubbish compressor things. We have this issue to deal with, and being an FE College many (probably the majority) of learners are on a short courses, say 4 weeks or even 1 day (rather than the full 34 weeks). The student account generation program (which is run once per day) needs to look at the end date of the course and use that when creating the accounts (set them to expire then or soon after) & either the creation program itself or another needs to disable the accounts for any learner who have been "early leavered" (left the course early). Bruce. Edited January 29, 2011 by Bruce123
Bruce123 Posted January 29, 2011 Author Posted January 29, 2011 Yes similar experience here, I remember reading something on the backupexec site about poor performance with multiple hidden shares in windows. Probably fixed with server 2008 though. Setting up backupexec jobs is certainly slower because it searches all the hidden shares each time. I've been setting up mainuserdatafolder$/username homedirs for a while now instead of userdata/username$ and its a noticeable speed increase when browsing the root folder. I wouldn't go back, put it that way. Interesting to read the backupexec and speed issues with multiple shares. Problems we've had in the past: Years ago, we had a fileserver keel over twice (and it had to be reinstalled twice as a result) and we couldn't work out why until we determined that it was caused by the large number of shares on the server (there were several 1,000). On Windows, the information about the shares is stored in the HKLM registry hive and Win2K had a 16MB limit on the size of the file containing this local hive (system.dat?), if size creeps above this limit the server will crash and won't boot (with a message about the system.dat file being missing or corrupt). It makes creating, deleting, moving and securing accounts more cumersome. E.g. I have a script which automatically moves homes students' home drives to the server closest to where there have been logging on (we have multiple sites and the script is scheduled to run once per week using logon logs to determine where they have been logging on the most). It has to remotely create a share when it moves the files and remotely remove the share from the source server. The program has to set the share permissions, rather than it happening automatically as with NTFS. What about the history? I assume that the one-share-per-user method dates back to Novell servers (from the 90s) and was retained on MS networks until a never version of Windows introduced the network drive deep mapping feature (\\server\share$\folder). Of course, the server would have needed NTFS to secure files.
jimmy_2k Posted January 29, 2011 Posted January 29, 2011 In response to dealing with a revolving door of casual users. What I would do is setup an OU for each year of entry (I know its not always BP to setup a lot of OUs) e.g. 2011 intake and then move all students in the group to the year of original intake. If they are casual students, setup an expiry date for when they are going to leave that should address any security concerns. At the end of that academic years intake lifespan if you like simply either disable all accounts in that OU or delete them. Archive the data for 2 further years. If you have casual staff which aren't on SIMS, put a form system inplace where they fill in the time of their casual employment, if they don't have a termination date only enable the account for the period of that term and make their LM aware to ask for an extension.
dhicks Posted January 29, 2011 Posted January 29, 2011 A) What system do people use (one share per user or deep mapping)? B) What system do they use to autogenerate their student accounts? If it's any help, Samba will let you use the username string as part of the share path, so you just define one share (e.g. /data/%U/home) and each user that views that share sees just their own files. You can specify an auto-creation script at the same time, so user's folders are created when they first view their share. I don't know if Windows allows the same feature, but if you have stand-alone file servers that you're looking at replacing anyway you could look at replacing them with a Samba-based NAS device (or just sort out your own using your existing hardware and some new hardddrives). -- David Hicks
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