Roaming profiles and users who hop between countries

[bhogaj31]

Bit of back ground first.

My organisation has offices world wide, the main office is in London. We have the following file servers in the following offices.

London = 1 x NTPDC
1 x NTBDC

Hong Kong = 1 x NTBDC

New York = 1 x NTBDC

Stockholm = 1 x NTBDC

All the user that are configured with a roaming profile are on Windows 2000 Pro SP4 machines.

And all the machines participate in the one and only domain in the company.

Problem is this -

User1 is normally based in NYC and the profile information for his account says e.g. "\\NYBDC\Profiles$\User1".

When in NYC he can use any win 2k pro machine and his profile roams with him and is pretty quick to download and upload.

He then decides he needs a trip to London. When he gets to London he finds a windows 2000 pc and logs on. He sits there for what seems like 2 hours while his roaming profile is pulled down from the server in NYC.

I have to then go to the PDC in London and change his profile path to point to a server local to the Location he is in now. Then I get the profile from the NYC server and ftp it to the London server and faff around a bit before he can log on and off in a reasonable time.

QUESTION

Is there any way possible a configuration change can be made to make sure that all my users can roam as in the above example and download their profiles from a server local to which office they are in.

E.g It would be ideal if you could specify the profile path in the user account as "\\DOMAINNAME\Profiles$\User1" but I know you can't.

There is definately no way we are ever moving to Win 2000 server or an Active directory environment!!!! So no answers along that road please .


We are however moving to "Freebsd 4.5" with "Samba 2.2.2" so any answers along that road would be good.

Any help much appreciated

Later

J

 

[jockojem]

Hi There

Quick suggestion, in a off the top of my head/early morning style...

You could use the %logonserver% variable. usrmgr will accept this in the profile path. You will then need to write some sort of xcopy script to keep the profiles current between your london pdc and bdc and nyc overnight.

Probably not perfect - but hope it helps!

Jem

 

[grahamjudy]

There is an ADM you can use to exclude directories to download. We found that most of the time it is temporary internet files and people with large Outlook Express database files that are the slowest.

 

[bhogaj31]

I have seen that somewhere , but can't remember which one it is.

You don't happen to know which one it is do yah?

Regards

J

 

[grahamjudy]

Oops, sorry. I looked into it recently but did not implement it. I probably threw the paper away. Will check around. Meanwhile, maybe this will help...

http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/19725/19725.html

 

[bhogaj31]

It's in Winnt.adm , I have found it , thanks chaps for your help.

Regards

Jat