Windows 2000 pro - Roaming Profiles problem under NW5.1

[BeeAppy]

Hi all,

I have NT4 and Win2Kpro clients on a NetWare 5.1 network.
I have set up a policy in NWAdmin to enable roaming profiles, storing these in the users home directory.
The NT4 profiles roam quite nicely, no problem there, but the NT5 (Win2K) ones seem to have a life of their own and behave inconsistently. I realise that NT4 and NT5 profiles are stored independantly (unfortunately) and am not expecting profile data to flow between OS's, (though that would be nice and if anybody has done this I'd love to know how !)

Thanks in advance,

Kind Regards,
Shaun Dunmall
Computer Scientist
Mid Kent Oncology Centre
United Kingdom

 

[TheLad]

Can you explain exactly how they behave inconsistently? What do they do? -----------------------------------------------------
"It's true, its damn true!"
-----------------------------------------------------

 

[BeeAppy]

Well say I have two NT4 machines, machines A and B.
If I log on to machine A, create an empty folder on the dektop then log off, this change should be uploaded to the server. This does appear to be the case as when I log on to machine B the profile is downloaded and the new folder appears as you would expect. I have performed a variation on this with more machines and checking other data, such as Outlook Express mail setup and messages, and it all works fine.

However, on Windows 2000 when I repeat the above tests the profiles are not always read or saved as appropriate. For instance when I log on I may get an error message when I log on to say that my profile was unavailable and therefore it's going to log me on using a local profile. Or, when I log off I may get a message saying that the profile could not be saved, "Access Denied". But it's not consistent and I haven't worked out why yet, which is very frustrating ! I have full admin rights on the network so there should be no problem saving a profile to my home drive when I log off of any machine, yet I frequently have a profile in my home drive that is days old !

We recently set up a Windows XP machine to test and installed the Novell beta client for it. Preliminary roaming profile testing with that one machine looks promising, but obviously we can't roll XP out as a solution as we don't know how to drive the thing yet !

We are using ZenWorks starter pack at the moment, but we will be moving up to ZfD3 fairly soon, maybe that will solve all our roaming profile problems, what do you think ?

Kind Regards
Shaun Dunmall
Computer Scientist
Mid-Kent Oncology centre

 

[GaryBlake]

I have seen similar issues like this in the past and although not done extensive testing, the issues seems to be related to the version of ZEN / Client that you are using. Try running some tests with ZEN 3.0 / 3.2 and NT Client 4.8 + ZEN SP. I beleive this issue to be in connection with the fact that previous versions of ZEN ie 2.0 and lower were not developed with Win2k in mind and as a result there are a number of quirks.

 

[TheLad]

I agree with GaryBlake. You need to be running the latest versions. I would also advise that you apply SP3 for novell Client 4.8 as this fixes a lot of bugs in the original release. -----------------------------------------------------
"It's true, its damn true!"
-----------------------------------------------------

 

[BeeAppy]

Thankyou, both of you.
As I said above we are currently only using the ZEN starter pack, and an upgrade to the full product is overdue ! Hopefully, this will cure the problem.

I did some more (unsuccessfull) testing today using 4.80 and sp3. I even tried using 4.81 (just out), but that was a disaster, thought I was going to have to rebuild the machine at one point.

Thanks again.
(I'll let you know if upgrading to ZfD3 improves matters.)

Shaun.