roaming profiles - help needed

[moosedude1]

Hello. I am new to this forum and to roaming profiles. I have a W2k3 sp2 server (more of a file share) and several WinXP SP2 workstations all in a workgroup config. I need to setup roaming profiles. I have read the following:

http://technet2.microsoft.com/Windo...f7c9-4cf0-9131-78924af776551033.mspx?mfr=true

with no success. Can someone please give me instructions or point me in the right direction to get this up and running?

Thank you in advance.

 

[jhaith]

Before I get into too much detail what exactly are you wanting to gain by using roaming profiles? Feel free to post back any questions you have.

Here's two options you have.

1. (Recommended) You should move your computers from your workgroup to a Domain by setting up Active Directory on your Windows 2003 server. Once you do this you just create a network share with appropriate permissions and set the users to a roaming profile using the Active Directory management interface. There are numerous tutorials on the web for doing this.

2. Alternatively you 'can' setup roaming profiles using your workgroup, but I don't recommend it. For each user account you have to create that account on the server, create a directory to use as their roaming profile, copy all the users files from their workstation to that shared directory for each specific user, add each user account to each workstation, and change the settings of each of those user accounts profile to point to the shared directory on the server. Lots of time wasted, some of it can be scripted out, but still not a very good way to go.

-jhaith

 

[moosedude1]

Thank you for the info. This is what I want to do.

I have 4 computers and 1 server in my home. I use one desktop for gaming, 1 laptop for college. The wife has one computer for business, and one for gaming/web surfing. I wanted some sort of centralized storage for the profiles. We have had a bad past with hard drives crashing. This would be a very bad pain to go through during the end of a college cycle (going through Univ. of Phoenix online. The classes last 5 weeks, and every weekend, there is a ton of work to do). I have had the drive crash and take my papers with it, only to have to re-do the research and writing/final turn-in within a couple of hours. My wife cannot afford to lose ANY work, so I have pointed her "My Documents" to a share on the server, and backup daily with shadow copies running twice a day. I want something that in the event of a drive crash, the person can move to another system, and almost immediately pick up where left off last time logging in/off.

So, I was thinking of the roaming profiles. I do not really want to set-up Active Directory, as we only have a single server, and if it fails for whatever, login can be rough....

 

[jhaith]

Ok, using a workgroup for that situation would be fine. Check out this article and it will give you pretty good instructions on what you need to do. Good luck, have any problems post back.

http://www.quantumsoftware.com.au/support/KB/Article.aspx?ID=154

-jhaith

 

[moosedude1]

jhaith,

Thank you. I have tried that, and for some reason, it copies the files to the local computer, but during logoff, it fails to copy back to the server. It is like a one way profile, no changes are saved back to the server (they are still in the local computer profile cache). I was reading somewhere that ti could be due to security permissions on the server, but all the event logs look good. Any suggestions?

 

[jhaith]

Manually copy the profile to the server share where the profile is stored to make sure you have permissions to write to that directory under that user account. If you can't copy the files over check to see what the permissions are for that directory and user.

-jhaith