Content of all Roving users cleard .. settings and docs gone gone gone

[YorkeRodda]

I am a teacher and systems administrator at a new Independent School called Woodhill in South Africa. We have an ADMIN NT servers – for the Administration of the school – and it has about 14 PCs (all Win 2K), and various printers attached to it .. and this is connected via a fibre link to second “PC_Training” NT server with 20 PCs attached to it.

For some technicality (I think we had re-named many of the PCs) we very clearly did run out of licenses and were getting a daily messages in the Events Viewer for some time. Following the good advice “if it is not broken do not fix it” I did not do anything about the license error message. I am now wondering if this could be the cause of us losing all the content of most of our Roving users profiles. There was also a situation where the License Manager said we had used up 75 licenses but we only have 34 Clients (and 30 client licences had been loaded although we have documentation for 34) .. you have a copy of licence document on your records.

There was a pair of error messages regarding licences in the Events viewer – apart from the one for the NT Server mentioned above. The other one was for Exchange server.

There was no error message when a user logged in .. but the settings and documents in the users profile were just not there. When I looked for them in the profiles of the user there was only a set of folders like My Documents, Start menu, Favourites etc .. but no files not even the Ntuser.dat file.

If I copied shortcut icons onto the desktop folder or start folder of the users profile there was no error message .. but they just seemed to evaporate and the next day when I looked they were gone. After loading more licenses these disappearing tricks seemed to be a thing of the past.

I would have expected user licenses that had run out would throw up an error and not even log the user next user in .. but in our case it seems that after a time of sending Error messages in the Events Viewer the system was programmed to wipe those users users profiles clean. Is this possible?

Could there be another reason why users lost their settings and any docs that were in My Documents?

Thank you in anticipation for taking the trouble to read this sad tale .. and I hope that we can come to resolve the problem.

Greetings


Yorke

 

[YorkeRodda]

I am sending a reply to my own request for help .. it is just another request.

What can cause the content of Profile on NT 4.0 to dissapear?

Yorke yorke@webmail.co.za

 

[CitrixEngineer]

My theory is that it's possible that there was some kind of communications problem, the users logged on and used their local profiles instead of the roaming ones.

Then, the comms issue was resolved, the users logged off, and the local profiles, being found to be more recent than the roaming ones, were copied back to the server.

I have seen similar issues, and my usual approach is to create common group profiles that are stored in a separate folder. If anything like this happens, the users get restored to the group profile. They lose their desktop colours and customisations, but the functionality - and most importantly, the applications - are restored.

I usually work in terminal server environments, so I'm not sure how much of this is relevant to you - but I hope at least some of it helps!

 

[YorkeRodda]

Many thanks CitrixEngineer! I did delete all the users local profiles from PCs in our training Centre .. and this could have deleted the profiles that were on the NT server.

Do you think we have a bit of a missmatch with NT servers and Win 2k Pro. clients? Should we upgrade to the Win 2k server (we have the license and software but not the confident skills)?

Once again many thanks. I feel a little out of my leauge in this forum .. as I am not a great tekie but more a teacher.

Best wishes


Yorke
P.S. Can you recomend a good Ghost type software for making clones of our client HDDs? Ghost is a little expensive but I understand it can do the job well.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

There are some reasonable migration documents on Microsoft's site - and I would say yes, upgrade your NT4 boxes to W2k, if you already have the licenses.

I have seen a few oddities with roaming profiles on W2k clients in an NT4 server environment. These have mainly been due to W2k's default permissions - which are tighter than NT's.

I like Ghost as imaging software and use it exclusively. That doesn't mean it's the best - I have read postings from others on this forum who recommend other software.

My advice here is simply look around, see what matches your needs (budgetary, fuctionality, etc).

Hope this helps.

 

[YorkeRodda]

Many thanks CitrixEngineer

Please send me your e-mail to yorke@cares.co.za so I can thank you personally .. if not accept my real gratitude!!

I think I can set my current problem to rest and focus on getting my confidence and skills up so that I can do a Win 2k server installation and Win 2k Exchange .. also I need to persude the school Director to trust me enough when I trust myself!

Best wishes

Yorke

 

[CitrixEngineer]

My email is CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk.