Guys i have an HP nas server, this server became responsible for home folders and roaming profile users, well i need your help to enhance this server, i moved the Home folders and roaming profile to it, after a request from the director to secure the network and protect the data, so they didn't want any data to be stored on local hard disks, anyway i think i did something wrong which is applying redirection a long side with roaming profile, and the nas server is running Wink23 R2, i need your ideas to enhance it to the best.

Can you clarify the bold part? What is it that it is/isn't doing, that you feel it should/shouldn't be?

Are you backing up the entire roaming profile "home" folders? Or do you have the My Documents folders pointed to a seperate share so they can be backedup by themselves? etc., etc., etc...


Ever notice I like to help...but I make you work for it?

I am sorry for make it not clear, but well simply what is the best performance solution for roaming profiles ? redirection or roaming profile ?

[Nudge]!!!

LOL - Hay man, I've been working.

How to prevent folders from roaming with a profile in Windows 2000 - Should help to remove the IE Temp folder from the list of files that are dragged across the wire during logon.

You should redirect the My Documents folders to a different share & location to prevent it from being Sync'ed during logon/logoff. this will also make it much easier to backup only the actually "important data" and leave the rest of the (tons of) profile crap to fend for itself.

Many users tend to leave large or important files on their desktop, so... you might want to consider giving it the same treatment as the My Documents folder.

Depending on (business) the importance of pictures will/should decide the My Pictures folder location.

Let them keep their My Music folder in their My Documents folder on the server. ...Then remind them periodically that all music files will be deleted from the server every (Change the day randomly) Thursday promptly at (Meh, this week it's...) 9:00 (Do Not Specify am or pm...) *Shrug* ...At least that's what I do.

Lol, thanks so much, about media files i have Win2k3 R2 installed on the server, so i prevented all the audio formats from being copied to the file systems (doing that with blocking there favorite sites from ISA turn your users to monsters against you so take care )

Roaming profiles work great if the user only logs into one or two machines, and/or all your computers are configured the same (as typical in a corp environment). The more machines they log into that have different software configs, the more problems you will have. If used in the environment they're intended for, the system works well, though. I do recommend you make the changes PM suggested and kill the IE cache, or it's gonna take half an hour to log in eventually. And if your boss is serious about the "no files on hard drives" thing, you'll need to set the "delete local copies of profile on logout" GPO as well. That will kill your idea for blocking media files, but if the boss wants it, that's how it's done.

Folder redirection is a completely different animal. The testing I have done shows it to be unreliable, at least how it's implemented in WS2k3 and XP. If you have Vista clients, it's better (as Vista was designed from the ground up with a file sync engine built in), but not as good as roaming. I am rolling my first 2k8 file server live this weekend, and we'll see if there's further improvement. I suspect there will be, as literally everything I have tried on 2k8 works much better than it did in 2k3 R2.

Speaking of which, you'll be wanting to upgrade that file server to 2k8 as soon as you're able. The file server tools introduced in 2k4 R2 work about 100x faster in 2k8, and the new 2k8 clustered file server profile is the slickest thing MS has done in 10 years. If you need a highly available file server, it's now simple to do.

EDIT: Oh, one more VERY IMPORTANT thing: turn off share-level caching (on the advanced fatures of the share tab) on any shares involved in roaming profiles, or you WILL have issues. It will tell you about it in the system logs, but once a user loses data it will be of little consolation that you can tell them why....

This is from the description of the policy, is there any need to exclude any more folder or thats what you ment by IE temp ?

LOL Ya got me, I'd forgotten that was a default policy. You might consider excluding the Desktop folder also, if you have users that either keep large files or many files on their desktop. But that has great potential to cause other issues too (It's a play IT by ear thing).

We have 3000+ users using roaming here, and I can state as fact that unless you turn on the flag to tell it not to that the Temporary Internet Files folder does indeed move with the profile. This may be a new change to the defaults in 2k3 R2, but under 2k3 RTM I had to manually turn them off, as they were causing all manner of hell for us.

Best thing to do? Pick a few users as test cases and turn it on for them, see what the default behavior is, and adjust accordingly. You can never fully trust the documentation to tell you what's going to happen.

Damn you guys...Now I have to go and look it up. (hehe)

*Shrug*

Either way Illrigger right, enable the policy so you know it's working ... and then double check to be sure.

...Better to have 5 mad users than a lynch mob.

Lol, actually i have a more weird problem for months, well we have portal here, and as you know its authenticate active directory users, randomly some users can't login to it using its dns but they can login to it using its ip, i can ping its name from there machines normally which means its not a DNS problem, but when they type the name in the browser its give them back a nice access denied message, if they used ip its working fine, deleting the whole of the profile didn't help, and the only solution is treat it as a corrupted profile and delete it and recreate, any ideas about this ?!