Roaming Profile setup across WAN

[snapicus]

I am working on a test lab setting up one central domain controller and two additional backup domain controllers on separate LANs and need some help setting up the romaing profiles. For example, one employee works normally at site #1 and we would store his roaming profile at that site's server. Since we are running one central active directory and if the employee goes to work one day at site #2,I wouldn't want said employee's profile trying to pull from site #1's server eating up bandwidth across the WAN.

My question is: Is this something that can be accomplished with a login script attached to the profile? Or would it be easier to have the profile shares on both servers to replicate at a pre-determined time of day so profiles are available at both sites?

 

[MCCooper]

Hey snapicus,

We too are looking into this and have found a document that gets us halfway there. Check this out

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winntas/maintain/featusability/creatuse.mspx.

Pay attention to the "Using the %LogonServer% Variable" section.

We are using Win2003 in all sites and replicating active directory to our branch office over a WAN. We are trying to make our roaming profiles seamless so that users can travel between offices with no intervention from the IT Dept. The doc talks about using NT's Directory Replicator service to replicate the user profiles between servers. I think in Win2000 or Win2003 we will need to somehow use DFS for this function.

Let me know if you have any further luck.

Cheers

 

[snapicus]

I was able to sort of get a test solution here. I never got to set it up in practice, but the test environment worked out fairly well. It did involve setting up a DFS setup where the profiles were stored on both LANs. Instead of restricting the profiles to only the employee's native location, I set the DFS to replicate both profile locations between each other. To conserve bandwidth, I set the replication to take place overnight when there was only minimum staff on site which should work out fairly well as it is rare when one employee works out of the other location. In addition, using GPOs helped in restricting the profile sizes to save on disk space and cut the load of the replication.