Profiles and remote sites

[lengoo]

Hi all,
I have a remote site which is connected to our main office via a 1mbit link. We have installed a domain controller down at that site to allow for faster logins.
Each user on our network is a roaming user and in Active Directory and Users we have set up the profile path for them. However, we have a significant proportion of users who are based at the remote site and they frequently come to the main office to login. This works fine except that if there profile is on the remote site, it takes ages for them to login while their profile is downloaded. This also happens for users who's accounts are based at the main office and they try to login at the remote office.
Is there a way where we can set a profile path on both remote and main site and when they login, the machine detects the nearest server and downloads the profile from there?
Thanks

 

[aftertaf]

-you could use the %logonserver% variable in the profile path, but you'd have to have up to date versions on both sites.

- Maybe with DFS, the version problem above would disappear completely. You could set it for manual replication once a night, for example....

Aftertaf

"Solutions are not the answer." - Richard Nixon

 

[Tightpants]

We have tried to achieve the same with our two offices. You may want to take a look at thread931-1027135 for more information.

In our situation the roaming profiles just wouldn't load across the VPN link because they were too big. So I am currently trying different ways of at least getting a basic user profile available at each site. But then you have the problem of defining the user profile path and logon script for the user, which changes depending on where they are logging in.

I tried the %logonserver% variable but this didn't work because I couldn't guarantee which server would authenticate the user.

I think I have nearly got it working by defining two environment variables in Control Panel, System on each workstation. The first variable I have called PROFILEPATH. For workstations at Site A I have defined this as \\Server1\Profiles and at Site B it is \\Server3\Profiles. The user has the profile path set as %PROFILEPATH%\%USERNAME% in the user's properties.

The second variable is called SITEID. Site A workstations have this defined as SiteA and Site B workstations have this defined as SiteB. I use this to call up the correct logon script %SITEID%.BAT.

So depending on where they log in, they always call up the correct profile path and logon script. This is in the testing phase but I am optomistic.

DFS or something similar should be able to keep each copy of the profile up-to-date but I haven't investigated this aspect of the problem.

 

[JLapoff]

Have you thought about hard coding the IP address/DNS servers of the machines at the different sites? If you specify a DNS server you can force the profile to load from the DNS server at the site. The Domain controllers should be replicated constantly. We use this setup for 7 locations and it works great.

Hope this helps,
Jon

 

[Tightpants]

Thanks for the tip JLapoff. How do you force the profile to load from the DNS server at the site by specifying the DNS server? Our DNS servers' IP addresses are issued to the workstations using DHCP.

Also, what do you use to replicate the domain controllers - presumably you are talking about all the data on the file servers and not just the active directory information?

 

[Tightpants]

How can you force the profile to load from the DNS server at the site?

 

[penauroth]

The simplest solution to your problem is one provided by aftertaf. Create a DFS link and replica set for the profile share and set a replication schedule to replicate once at night. Modify user's account settings profile attribute to point to the DFS UNC.

Paul

Work on Windows, play on Linux.