Moving Default Profile Location from %systemroot%

[MISAdmin]

My Citrix Server (W2K Server / Citrix XPs) has a 4GB boot partition on one local disk (M and a 15GB shared partition on a second local disk (O

My M: has 550MB of free space and dwindling. I have 100 users with published desktops that have growing temporary interenet files, documents, ect expanding their profile folder sizes everyday.

Time to move the Profiles to the 15gb drive and free up space on my boot partition.

I think I know how to do this, (and I'll find out tommorow morning ;-) ) But can anybody verify that this is correct.

First, I will move the "Documents and Settings" folder from my M: to my O: and make sure users have the appropriate rights to it. Next, I'm thinking I need to go into the Registry and modify HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurentVersion\ProfileList and modify the deafult key to change the profile path setting from %systemroot%\documents and settings to O:\documents and settings

For the existing users, I suppose I'll also have to go to each individual key designated by SID and update their profile paths as well... Not looking forward to that but shouldn't take more than a half hour...

Anyway, I'm thinking that should do it and keep additional profiles from being created on M: each time a user authenticates...

Am I missing anything?

 

[DaveNamou]

I DO NOT RECOMMEND THAT YOU TRY THAT!!!! That will give you way more problems then you have ever had.

Try this instead.
1. Leave the profile location in the default location
2. Create a script that deletes the "Temporary Internet Files" folder during logon. The command would be...
RD &quot;%UserProfile%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files&quot; /S /Q (<-- All on one line)
3. If they are storing items in the My Documents folder then create a home drive for them on a network share. This will force most of all their applications to automatically save to their network share. Your network share can even be your O: drive if you want. You might want to copy their current docs to their home drives the first time for them or you can script it. You also don't have switch everyone to a network share folder at the same timeo do this to everyone at once.

An average profile should not take more than 5MB once you delete the Temporary Internet File and move the documents folder.


Hope that helps! Dave Namou, MCSE CCEA

 

[MadanB]

Hey, did that work what David told you? I am in the same boat. All my users are saving locally, and I was going to move the documents and settings till I saw this. Please let me know how you solved your problem. Thanks.

 

[MISAdmin]

Well...
I really appreciate Dave's advice, and he definately fed into my &quot;worry zone&quot; of what types of things could go wrong and what types of surprises could happen.

I had actually thought of creating the home drive network shares, and that was pretty much done anyway. The internet temp files were bugging me, and, I'll be honest, I hadn't thought of writing a script to delete them... that should work just fine.

But... on Friday, I looked at the Documents and Settings directory again int eh afternoon. Basically, what I saw was that I was losing about 20mb per day. (So about 100MB in a work week.) What had started with just over 600MB was now just barely over 500MB. That means, that if I did nothing, it would be just under 400MB at the end of this week, and by next week, I'd be really hurting...

I looked through the directory, and, frankly, there were only a couple users storing Documents in teh &quot;My Documents&quot; folders. (Which will likely be increasing in the future, but that only makes things worse.) And there was only one user with a large amount of temp files. I deleted those. I had actually been keeping a log of disk space during the week though, and I could see that those two areas were not the only areas causing this problem. So... even if I did go to the trouble of writing the script and finishing off the home directories, I would still be losing Disk Space from data being captured in the Documents and Settings folder somewhere... and nowhere I could immediately put my finger on.

Sorry, but, I don't like seeing Boot Partitions drop below 500MB and I'm not budgeted for an additional drive. I actually found TID's in both Citrix's Knowledgebase as well as Microsoft's Knowledgebase on this that pretty much just outlined what I had stated above. Don't get me wrong, I know where Dave's coming from and I can think of a few instances where I might run into more trouble than if I had left them alone... But if the munufacturers are providing TID's on how to do it, there must be other people out there who are running that way...

I made the change this morning. ...Came in an hour early, created a new Documents and Settings Directory on the O: and copied all of the profiles into it. I left the Administrator Profile and a copy of the &quot;All Users&quot; Profile on the M: (The ALL Users Profile is a system folder so it won't let you move it...) I then modified the default profile path in the registry key from my above posting to reflect the new location and then modified the directory path in the 50 or so sub-keys by SID for each user that already had a Profile... (I didn't change the Administrator Profile though, remember... I left it on the M Rebooted the Server just for good measure and tested everything out. Whole thing was done in 45minutes... So far it has been running 4 hours... everything was finished before the first user logged on and I have had absolutely NO problems. My boot drive now has a beautiful stagnant 800MB of free space that isn't getting any smaller and all of the user Profiles are intact and working flawlessly.

So far, I'm a happy camper.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I agree with Dave - users' profiles should never become file storage areas. I think 5Mb is quite large - I'm more used to seeing half that.

I use system policies, with custom templates to redirect as many user files as possible to home drives, network shares, wherever. Temporary Internet files can be managed this way too.

All that's required is a little dabbling in the black art of Policies (which really aren't too tricky once you've got used to them). Policies work best with roaming profiles, IME. As with anything else, experiment with test users first - in a test environment, if you have one.

I hope this helps CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[MadanB]

Hi Guys,

MISAdmin, not to be a pain, but could you outline for me how you went about moving everything? I have a server and like I said before I am in the same boat. I just don't want anything to go wrong. Thanks for your help

 

[MISAdmin]

MadanB,

Even though I made this change... I still agree with Dave and Citrix Engineer that it probably isn't the best idea. I liked Citrix Engineer's idea of playing with policies and I may very well go back and play with that abit on a test system and see how things work, and, if it goes well, I may eventually move the profiles back to the boot partition and setup the policies to do what I want... But, time was of the essence, I was running out of disk space, and I didn't have a lot of time, or leeway to play around on a live server. So, with that said, if you still want to move your profiles, this is what I did:

Remember, during the Citrix installation, I reassigned my drive letters from C: -> M: and so on, so I have a boot partition (M that is 4gb in size, and a second partition for data (O that is 15gb in size. (N: is my CDRom)

Basically, I opened two windows... one where I could see M: and the other where I could see O:. Then I right clicked on the &quot;Documents and Settings&quot; folde ron the M: and dragged it over to the O:, released it, and clicked on the COPY option. (Make sure you don't have any users loged in when you do this -including users that are just disconnected) becasue their NTUSER.DAT files will be open and you won't be able to copy all the files.

Anyway, when the copy is done, go into the Registry Editor on the Citrix box and find this subkey:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList

You will see a &quot;Default Profile Location&quot; Value with a ProfileImagePath set to %systemdrive%\documents and settings
I changed the path to O:\Documents and Settings (obviously you need to change the path to match your network settings)

Under the default, you will see profile locations listed out by SID for every user who currently has a profile created... I had about 50 of them. Each of these Values has the same path line pointing to their profile... You need to go and modify each and every one.

(I chose NOT to move the Administrator profile, and left it on M:\Documents and Settings but changed all the other ones)

At this point, I realize I already have a copy of them on O:, but you can never make to many copies ;-) I went to M:\Documents and Settings, and MOVED each of the profile directories to a folder I had created on another server. (This gave me another backup of the profile directories besides what I had on O:.) If your following along, you'll note that I left the Administrator profile under M: but moved all the others. (You'll also need to leave the &quot;All Users&quot; profile as it is a system folder - so I chose not to mess with it, but to leave it in both locations)

Once all this is done, you now have all of the profiles in the O:\Documents and Settings directory and just a couple things in the M:\Documents and Settings directory. (Also, at this point, my M: was about 400MB lighter )

I believe at this point, I rebooted the Server - just for good measure - and then I logged onto Citrix from my workstation to test out a few of the profiles and make sure they were working properly. Everything appeared fine.

Since I have done this, I only ran inot one issue... I am Publishing Full Desktops where users can get at Microsoft Office, IE, and Outlook Clients.... I had trouble with the .FAV files for Outlook trying to point back to the M: for the old profiles, and the users were getting a message coming in and out of Outlook that the file didn't exist... I actually ended up uninstalling Office as a published app from the Citrix Server and then reinstalling it because I had forgotten to apply the Compatibility Script anyway, the first time around, and thought that would be cleaner if I just did a fresh install... That seemed to fix the issue.

Other than that, so far so good....

 

[MISAdmin]

REplying to bring this to the top for Jon.

 

[tobywenham]

This is an interesting article I have a similar issue in that a Windows folder is being created in my users home drives. Does anyone know how to stop this being created as it is causing problems.

 

[DaveNamou]

I'm not sure how you can stop it, but you could just delete it when they are logging on. Dave Namou, MCSE CCEA

 

[MadanB]

Hi guys,

Just wanted to let you know I had the same problem, I just created a bat file to delete the folder when users logon. I couldn't come up with anything easier! One of my friends told me you can actually create a registry entry to stop the folder from being created, but I just don't have the developement environment to test that one yet!

Hope it helps,
Madan

 

[tobywenham]

Many thanks for the update. Yes we could remove it as the users logon but as they log off the folder is created is it not ???

 

[DaveNamou]

I don't know if that's true or not, I think it's created during the logon process. But if it is created when the user logs off, then it's just deleted again when he/she logs on.
Dave Namou, MCSE CCEA

 

[woonbronmaasoevers]

So the profiles are big because of the temp inet files... why dont u use the &quot;delete cache when close ïnet explorer&quot;. i worked for me! (i had the same problem). The thing is.. its been so long that i forgot how :-D... i think citrix engineer knows about this.