Laptops

[Olliesaurus]

Hello,

 

A bit of background:

 

I started the position as Assistant Network Manager prior to the summer holidays, from June up to July I was supporting a couple of hugely unstable Unix servers, behind the scenes it was a complete mess, servers were up and down all the time and the previous technical staffs fix was to pull the power out the server and put it back in. I don't believe there were any backups for a good few months.

 

I was left overseeing a complete server change from Solaris to Windows. Now that we have the new server in I have a lot of staff saying that "it was better before summer, all this was pointless", which obviously is making me want to play chicken with a bullet train.

My issue being the fact that on the old server, staff could authenticate there laptops to the network shares via a batch script, they would then move there files between there local profile on the laptop and the network shares. However, on the new Windows environment when they move files to the server when they are logged on locally, only they can see the files.

 

Currently we are using mandatory profiles and the staff have a fair amount (40-100GB) of data saved on there local profiles.

 

After a week of securing, renaming, readdressing and updating the firmware (from the very first software release) of 25+ HP switches, configuring PCM, setting up an imaging server, moving servers from one server room to another and imaging two suites of computers on my own, im a little frazzled.

 

Does anyone know a viable way to use staff laptops within the network? any suggestions are greatly appreciated, I am at an end!

 

Many thanks,

 

Olliesaurus

[Bezza49]

What OS do the staff laptops have?

[BKGarry]

We have staff laptops with Windows Vista (yuk) and 7,

 

Each staff member has a local profile, but My Documents etc (not the desktop or app data) is redirected to the server, they have offline files enabled and there user is set to be able to logon to the laptop when away from the domain (basically not restricted to having a network connection available)

 

When they logon/off windows synchronises the files, they have mapped drives to the Shared/Common Area etc, which will work from hom evia VPN and are not synchronised.

 

Staff know they have to backup their desktops as that is not done by the Technical department, and that their my documents are always synchronised to the servers and backed up. Means they only have one username and password to remember and they do not have to copy stuff themselves.

 

Hope this helps,

[witch]

same as above but we have roaming profiles and redirected everything.

[BKGarry]

We did have that Witch, but with the fact that every member of staff has their own laptop as their one and only device (except admin who have PCs) the logon times (although every only so slightly quicker in the long run) and lack of "Roaming Profile has loaded incorrectly" messages makes our life that little bit better.