User setup and printers

[amberlynn]

Hello!

I have an office running SBS 2003 with ~20 users (mostly XP Pro).

Question #1 - User favourites/settings

Users don't seem to have been set up consistently.
Some users can log in to any PC and access their favourites/settings etc, but others can't. If I compare their user properties on the server there is no difference. How can I change this so any user can log in to any PC and access their own personal settings?

Question #2 - Printer Setup

This may be related to the last question, but for some users, their printers disappear and must be re-added occasionally.
For other users - no matter where they log in, they see every printer available on the network.
How can I make this conistent also?

Thanks in advance for any help!
Amber

 

[Lemon13]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roaming_user_profile

M. Knorr

MCSE, MCTS, MCSA, CCNA

 

[parktek08]

last time I used roaming profiles, it was pain full. logon was very slow most of the time. I could not make it work as problem was very random.

 

[amberlynn]

Thanks for the responses.
I'm reading up on Roaming Profiles, and it looks to me as though that's how the users were set up on this network.
Something has either gone wonky for these 2 users, or it was never set up properly.
When I log on to the server (as administrator) to view these profiles - i see a profile folder (shared) - within this folder I see all the users (including the 2 that don't seem to have a roaming profile). I can't view the properties - I get message "You do not have permission to view or edit the current permission settings for 'xuser' but you can take ownership or change the auditing settings.
As administrator why can't I look at these settings/folders?

Thanks,
Amber

 

[PaulGillespie]

Hi Amber,

you can't access the profiles because:

"You do not have permission to view or edit the current permission settings for 'xuser' "

You can change this by going into the properties of the folder and taking ownership and then changing the permissions.

Roaming profiles are a PITA in my experience. If you want to use them you will have to be strict on their size and you can get some wierd problems.

 

[amberlynn]

What would you suggest then? I have users that move around a fair bit, and need the ability to log on to different computers yet access all their stuff.

Another oddity about my 2 'unique' users - they (and 8 others in the office) just got new PCs and monitors. These 2 have a terrible display - almost red tinged letters, very unclear. Their display settings are identical to everyone elses. Is it possible that this too is related to this profile thing?

I really need to get this resolved...

 

[PaulGillespie]

Well use roaming profiles then and see how you get on with it.
You need to instruct your staff to not save items to the desktop. A company I know had a user who sent round a multimedia file to everyone, lots of people saved it to their desktop and cased the network to come to a crawl as when they were logging on/off it was copying the desktop down off of the server.

You could use login scripts and group policies to map drives, set up outlook and add printers.

 

[k0rrupt10n]

It may be worth considering redirected folder options instead.

 

[SteveRoadWarrior]

That's my suggestion; point the user's MyDocuments folder to their private area on the server. Back their machines up using another method, and far less frequently.

If a machine blows up, you at least can get them close to where they were. Files like Archive.PST don't end up in the roaming side of the profile anyway.