Your Network and Profiles

[sven]

Hello there!

 

I am due to move from IT Tech to Network Manager very soon. I have essentially been doing the job for a year now, but it's finally becoming "official". I have a lot of plans laid out (as it were) for what I want to change and improve. I have turned to the community in order to get a better idea of "best practice".

 

How do you guys all have your user profiles set up on your network?

 

At the moment we just have drive mappings, and each time a user logs onto a machine, a local profile is created. what kind of recommendations would you make when it comes to implementing mandatory/roaming profiles? How well does it work for your sites?

 

Any help or suggestions you can give me would be great. I guess what I'm really looking for is a bit of reassurance that I'm looking down the right path here.

 

Regards,

 

Sven.

[sted]

primarily im using mandatory profiles stored on the server but recently in one school ive been trialing local profiles (win7 deploy and mandatory profiles are a git to do it proprtly you need to sysprep the pc nanas to that) and am looking at doing staff laptops with redirected everytthing and roaming but thats still in testing on a vm as and when stage

[kili]

Local profiles for students, roaming profiles for staff.

 

In our school students access email via a browser so don't need to store preferences such as Outlook where as staff do.

 

Doing it this way also decreases login issues to the server for students as there not pulling down profiles. 400 students pulling roaming profiles can cause a slow down whilst there all logging on.

 

enforced/redirected desktop for staff and students.

This is especially relevant to staff using roaming profiles so that thay cant store huge files on the desk top as again this causes slow down at login when they try to pull down their desktop profile with 20 gb of files saved there lol...

[sven]

Local profiles for students, roaming profiles for staff.

 

In our school students access email via a browser so don't need to store preferences such as Outlook where as staff do.

 

Doing it this way also decreases login issues to the server for students as there not pulling down profiles. 400 students pulling roaming profiles can cause a slow down whilst there all logging on.

 

enforced/redirected desktop for staff and students.

This is especially relevant to staff using roaming profiles so that thay cant store huge files on the desk top as again this causes slow down at login when they try to pull down their desktop profile with 20 gb of files saved there lol...

 

Thanks really helpful, thankyou. the setup you have here is the exact same I was considering so it's good see see I'm thinking along the same lines someone else. We currently use an email solution provided externally by RM, but I am in the process of putting quotes together for a new Exchange 2010 Server. I was also considering just letting the staff and students use the Web Access, and then get Outlook set up for the admin offices.

[3s-gtech]

Local with redirected everything does seem very, very neat. We have that for staff, it's very flexible. Students are on mandatory - primarily because I have yet to find another way to stop them renaming their desktop icons to obscenities. Fail.

[Brpilot99]

- primarily because I have yet to find another way to stop them renaming their desktop icons to obscenities. Fail.

Have you tried desklock?

[sted]

or even just redirect desktop to a read only location

[3s-gtech]

^^Tried that. It doesn't redirect My Computer and My Documents, so they just rename them ***** and **** ** *****. Not the best when using AB Tutor to display classwork on the board

 

Not tired desklock - might do it but I reluctantly use extra programs, I tend to run things pared down with as few apps as possible for speed. Many machines have 512MB of RAM still - mandatory profiles also give me pretty quick logins.

Edited March 18, 2011 by 3s-gtech

[kevin_lane]

we have mandatory profiles for pupils and we have desktop redirect with staff. I will soon be redirecting the pupils start menu. one thing i would say is that staff do not like change especially when they have been used to saving to the desktop. change for them might cause you some problems so take caution, provide them with an alternate solution if they are accessing items from the network e.g i have added a folder on the desktop with each subject for each department which will map shortcuts be to the network location. so they don't have go through the start menu. and with the appropriate permission's

[dhicks]

How do you guys all have your user profiles set up on your network?

 

We're about the change over from roaming profiles to local this weekend - I have a script at the ready to delete the profile path for every member of teaching staff. TAs and the finance department have been used as a test group for the past week or two, with no real problems. We've told everyone to copy the contents of their "My Document" folder to their mounted network drive (Z). The major issue that I anticipate is the loss of Outlook 2003's "type ahead" database of email adresess, which is stored in a machine-local file that isn't synced to the user's roaming profile - I don't know what Outlook's developers were thinking on that one, but we have a solution ready (a utility to extract the emails from the .NK2 file and we'll have to figure out some way of getting those into Outlook's contacts database). Wish us luck :-)

[kevin_lane]

why would you want to use local than roaming ?

[actech]

We use local profiles for all users with no redirections. I have forced some desktop shortcuts via GPP's and trim out the start menu and desktop in the default profile when creating the image. The students can rename icons as much as they want because when they log off the profile is wiped from the local machine. This is done by adding them to the domain guests group. So far I haven't had any major problems with this.

 

Staff all have a dedicated machine so I let them do whatever they want. If it comes in broke and it takes more then 5 minutes to fix then it just gets a re-image.

[dhicks]

why would you want to use local than roaming ?

 

Because users tend to store wodges of files on their desktop / My Documents folder, which gets synced backwards and forwards between the workstation and server whenever they log on/off, which in some cases can take ages. Ideally we'd simply have everyone's Desktop and My Documents redirected to network file areas, and we'll move to that eventually, it's just going to take a little while to sort out all the assorted issues that are bound to crop up along the way.

[sted]

why would you want to use local than roaming ?

 

quicker logon, less network traffic

[dhicks]

less network traffic

 

Well, less network traffic to the central file server all in one go, anyway - if you're using redirected folders, all file open/reads/writes are going to need to come from your central file server. Hopefully these should be spread out, although in a school setting you'll still get a flurry of activity at the start / end of each lesson, and now network reposnse time becomes more important. I guess we'll see how out network and file servers handle things come Monday morning :-)

[Elison]

We use main profile (or mandatory) for teachers (with passwords of course) and the system admin and roaming profiles for students. Soometimes they need to install software that is why we allow it for roaming frofiles, but need to track what they install: whether they need it for studying or playing games (that happens sometimes).