Hi All
Roaming profiles have proved a nightmare for me. My main concern is
typically once a virus gets in to your network you have the perfect
mechanism for it to spread. For roaming profiles read roaming viruses. I
know it shouldn't happen but experience has told me if it can happen it
will, at some time or another. On more than one occasion you clean up an
infected machine that your AV software has detected and all appears fine
only for the user to logon and it to come straight back again.
Also, and this is a real world example, a user who travels with a laptop
that is a Domain member has his profile become corrupted. This, in turn,
stops the data in the profile being copied up and down from the server.
Worse still, the users receives no error messages and assumes all is OK. He
wrongly assumes all his My Documents is bring automatically copied up to the
server whenever he connects to the internal network. In reality he is
running on nothing more than a local copy from his laptop hard drive with no
backup and is totally oblivious. The first we found out about this would
have been when his hard drive failed but for us finding out by accident as a
result of something else that alerted us!
My understanding of roaming profiles is that they suppose that all machines
have almost identical hardware and software. So what happens when one
machine is a laptop and the other a desktop with a different software suite?
Again a real world scenario. I think the best example I had was when a user
logged on to a workstation with a graphics card that couldn't support the
resolution he had setup on another one that could. He was greeted with a
black screen as soon as he logged on. Just great when you are 90 miles down
the road!
So what are the supposed benefits? Outlook profiles follow the user. Well
Office 2007 now does that without them and don't forget the PST file and OST
file download issues. Especially so, if all the users have auto-archiving to
their My Documents setup, which is the default if memory serves me
correctly. Your printers follow you. How exactly is that an advantage when
you travel between floors in a building or geographical sites? I travel to
location B only for my roaming profile to print them out to my default
printer at location A. The R2 print console is a much better solution in my
opinion. Finally you have IE favourites. These are simply lnk files so
writing a DOS batch file to copy them to a server for backup purposes is not
difficult.
I remember reading in an early Windows 2000 Beta release book that MS would
prefer users use GPO's rather than roaming profiles.
Given all of the above my personal opinion is to avoid them if at all
possible.
Regards
Paul Lemonidis.
--------------------------------------------------
From: "Edward B. DREGER" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 10:18 PM
To: "NT System Admin Issues" <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Pros and cons for roaming profiles?
SC> Date: Tue, 8 Jan 2008 15:56:51 -0600
SC> From: S Conn.
SC> I was getting connection issues on my file server, resource
SC> depletion, etc. People would have issues opening even a 20 meg
SC> file, couldn't copy off anything, etc.
Interesting and bizarre.
/me decides to take even the few small archive.pst files off-server, and
ponders synching them back via scripted differential copy.
Eddy
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