Profiles - That old chesnut

[hagridsbeard]

Just a ponder about profiles. We use a mandatory profile (from a shared drive) for all non admin staff and logons are ok, varying between 40 - 60 seconds. But I've started wondering what the purpose of a profile is. With Group Policy and Preferences, surely they're essentially redundant?

 

I did a test taking the profile off a user and the first logon to a new machine was an upsetting 50 seconds, but every subsequent logon, even after a reboot, was 4 seconds! Which is amazing. Ideally, I'd like to go this route, but reduce the intial 50 seconds (which is when I assume the local profile is being created).

 

Anyone got any amazing ideas or tried going profile-less with any success?

[zag]

Yeh we do this for teachers now. I just removed the profile in active directory and they create their own wherever they log on.

 

It seems to work fine and I wonder why I tried so hard with roaming profiles in the past.

[hagridsbeard]

This is what I was thinking, but I would like to reduce that 50 second inital logon. And that was from a good machine. The 4 second ones thereafter are amazing, but that intial logon is a bummer. Espeicially for students who often use new machines. Not so much for staff though.

[plexer]

If you do this then any personalised settings are saved only on that machine so if a user sets preferences in an application or even the IE favourites if you don't point them elsewhere will be lost and have to be re-created every time thus the user experience will not be good.

 

In a business environment where a user tends to use the same machine day in day out it's not a problem but the nomadic use of machines in education I can see this as a pain for the end user.

 

ensure that you fuly test, document and involve the end user if this is what you intend to do.

 

Ben

[featured_spectre]

Not sure I would skip that process to be honest, I would let it build the profiles (log in as every user, may take a long while but bare with me) and then when its done, use that machine as the baseline image...therefore everyone after that logs into the new machines would only see the 4 second login

[DAZZD88]

The only issue with allowing local profiles is that if you don't remove them (via the appropriate GPO setting or using a script) then logon will eventually slow down and you'll end up with profile related errors for some of the programs that you use. Serif Drawplus 7 (and possibly 8 too) were PITAs for creating folders within folders inside the profile.

[hagridsbeard]

I redirect favorites to their home drive, so that's not an issue. And really, app config is still only local to each machine now anyway (as they just drag a mandatory profile down). Any settings in the MAN that I want to apply globally, I can roll out via GPP.

[sted]

have you tried it with a roaming profile its not much if any slower than local profiles and means users should get the same settings (ish) regardless of computer used

[hagridsbeard]

But roaming profiles allow changes to be made don't they (and then copied up to the server)? In any case, this is what confuses me, with the profile (mandatory on the server), the initial logon is faster (around 40 seconds) but subsequent logons stay at 40 seconds. Without a profile, the first logon is longer, but each one after only 4 seconds.

 

Surely with our mandatory profile, the first logon should be 40, then every subsequent 4 as the profile is already on the local machine? Or, as it's a mandatory proifle, does it get copied down each and every time regardless to the existance of a local one?

[Willott]

Mandatory profile will get copied every time - how big is your mandatory profile?

[sted]

But roaming profiles allow changes to be made don't they (and then copied up to the server)? In any case, this is what confuses me, with the profile (mandatory on the server), the initial logon is faster (around 40 seconds) but subsequent logons stay at 40 seconds. Without a profile, the first logon is longer, but each one after only 4 seconds.

 

Surely with our mandatory profile, the first logon should be 40, then every subsequent 4 as the profile is already on the local machine? Or, as it's a mandatory proifle, does it get copied down each and every time regardless to the existance of a local one?

 

mandatory is just a roaming profile thats effectively read only and will be copied to a pc each time its needed. You can set pcs to cache copies of roam ing profiles so it only needs to copy the differences and if unused foir x days kills it. Ive found mandatory ones sometimes give issues whereby it dosent get deleted on logout and you end up with user1,user1.local.user1.local.001 (or whatever) untl eventually it just wont let user one log on. With gpp ive started to move away from mandatory profiles esp with win7 as its a pita to make one now without cheating

[hagridsbeard]

Not massive, about 1.5mb. So, do roaming only get copied if there are changes? If so, is it simply a case of changing the man to a dat and if so, how do I prevent them making changes to it? Wouldn't think I'd been in the job seven years with questions like this...

[hagridsbeard]

mandatory is just a roaming profile thats effectively read only and will be copied to a pc each time its needed. You can set pcs to cache copies of roam ing profiles so it only needs to copy the differences and if unused foir x days kills it. Ive found mandatory ones sometimes give issues whereby it dosent get deleted on logout and you end up with user1,user1.local.user1.local.001 (or whatever) untl eventually it just wont let user one log on. With gpp ive started to move away from mandatory profiles esp with win7 as its a pita to make one now without cheating

 

If you're not using mandatory then are you using shared roaming for each user?

[sted]

If you're not using mandatory then are you using shared roaming for each user?

 

i give each user their own profile so \\server\profiles$\staff\teacher

 

they will update but if things are locked down and using gpp for things like reg settings im not too worried and i can always delete them if needed anyway. I suspect using one roaming profile for everyone is a very bad idea