Good morning,
We needed to find a way to have mandatory profiles that still allow some settings to roam.
XP has a built in command called “Reg” (reg.exe)You’ll need to double check that Windows 2k has the same function (It’ll probably be in the resource kit if it isn’t installed as standard)
It appears out of several thousand workstations we don't have any win2k workstations so I couldn't check this for you.
With “Reg” you can specify which registry keys you wish to export to a file. You can also use it to read registry keys back in from a file that you’ve created previously.
So, a solution to allow roaming mail settings and roaming printers (and anything else we care to add in the future) is to use a policy to run logon and logoff scripts.
The scripts will load the users unique settings at log on and record any changes at log off.
An example to allow roaming mail settings at logoff, the following line would appear inside a batch file:
reg export "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem" \\servername\%Username%\%Username%mail.reg
For auser this will create a file in the root directory of the users network drive called ausermail.reg
The next time they login, the machine will run the login script which contains the line
reg import \\servername\%Username%\%Username%mail.reg
This will load the settings that have previously been recorded at logoff. Obviously, you can expand on the scripts to allow for the first time they log on so it loads some default settings using the return code.
I.E (pseudo)
If return code = 1
Then load defaultmailsettings
End if
The line for exporting printers would be
reg export "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers" \\servername\%username%\%Username%printers.reg
The line for importing them would be
reg import \\servername\%username%\%Username%printers.reg
you can use it to export and later import any settings that would usually be stored in the ntuser.dat
I've only had this in a small test environment so far but it is working so well that we will be rolling it out when we go fully XP/mandatory. Hope hope it works as well for you.
Good luck
Andy Wood.
