Terminal Server - Specific Profiles

[adamhutton]

I'm setting up a windows 2003 terminal server, I want users to be able to login to it to access a database directly.

However, I don't want their roaming profiles to fully load on this server. There is an option to define a specific terminal server profile path, and it works great on one of our older win 2000 terminal servers, but not the 2003 one.

The 2003 server's license has not yet been activate and it's running on the 120 day grace period. I want to make sure everything is working before we invest in the licenses.

Does anyone have any idea why the terminal-specific path would work on an older 2000 terminal server, but not a freshly setup 2003 server?

Both are running in application server mode.

Thanks a ton,

Adam

 

[mlichstein]

Can you be more specific about how it doesn't work on the 2003 TS?

 

[adamhutton]

Instead of loading the terminal specific profile, it loads the user's normal roaming profile. The profile that contains all desktop settings, icons, backgrounds, other files.

I want it to load the terminal specific profile so that it doesn't so long to login, and clutter the server with user's files. Some of our users' roaming profiles are pretty large (35-200mb).

 

[PuterLuver]

The below is from:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/

WindowsServ/2003/all/deployguide/en-us/Default.asp?url=/
resources/documentation/WindowsServ/2003/all/deployguide/
en-us/sdcce_term_yayd.asp


Using Terminal Server–Specific Profiles

Use Terminal Server–specific profiles to present a session to the user that is different from the user’s desktop or to create user profiles optimized to the Terminal Services environment. The following are some of the situations where using Terminal Server–specific profiles might be advantageous:

* To provide users who are accessing Terminal Server with an environment that is different from the environment on their local computers.
* To provide a different look and feel for different users on the same terminal server, for example, if you have task workers and a manager on the same server.
* To better manage the size of user profiles for Terminal Services users who do not have controlled user environments that have been set through assigned or mandatory user profiles. You can use Group Policy to manage the profiles on the server that stores your Terminal Server profiles.

You can configure Terminal Services–specific profile settings for each user by using the following procedure.

To configure Terminal Services–specific profile settings

1. Open Active Directory Users and Computers.
2. Right-click the user for which you want to set profile settings, and then click Properties.
3. Click the Terminal Services profile tab.

You can configure the following Terminal Services–specific profile settings:

* Terminal Services User Profile path. You can choose a place to store users' Terminal Services profiles other than the default location.

Note
o You can also set this through Group Policy under Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Terminal Services. For more information, see "Designing Terminal Server Installation and Configuration" later in this chapter.
* Terminal Services home folder. You can specify a path to a home folder for use with Terminal Server sessions. This directory can be either a local folder or a network share.

For information about setting Terminal Server profiles, see "Terminal Services Profile" in Help and Support Center for Windows Server 2003.


Hope this help!! ,

-PuterLuver

 

[PuterLuver]

Sorry, I just copied and pasted that from MS. Lets say Jon Doe wants to use your TS server. In short, you'd create a folder on the server called TSProfiles (or whatever), share it to everyone full control, then for each user in AD, go to the Terminal Services Profile tab and put \\servername\tsprofiles\jdoe, and if you want to specify a home folder, you could use H: and then type \\servername\tsprofiles\jdoe\My Documents. Hope that helps, and I feel I'm leaving something out here, but if I remember, I'll be sure to post it.

-PuterLuver

 

[adamhutton]

Yes, I've done all that. It works great on an older windows 2000 terminal server. My problem is that I just setup another windows 2003 server as a terminal server and It's loading the normal profile (instead of the terminal specific profile).

Could it possibly be because I have not yet activated the licensing on the new server?

 

[TECHMAN007]

Adam,

Just so you know I am in the same boat on this. We currently have several Win 2003 servers running AD at several different locations in the US. We got a new timesheet system that uses Terminal Services so users log into the server from all over and it is applying their profiles from their local server which is taking forever to copy. I tried specifing a local "Terminal Services Profile" but it didn't appear to do much of anything. If you did figure out how to get it to use a different profile for your TS Server and your windows clients please let me know!

Thanks,

Dan