Depending on how you apply them, roaming profiles can do anything from making your life easier to saving your bacon. If a user needs access from all over the building, roaming profiles are a convenience. If you have 50 users and only 10 computers, roaming profiles are an easy solution. If an entire department’s computers die in the middle of a critical project, roaming profiles are a lifesaver.
Windows’ Roaming Profiles to the Rescue
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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“If an entire department’s computers die in the middle of a critical project, roaming profiles are a lifesaver.”
How are they a lifesaver since the roaming profile would have been the one they logged in with and would not contain any changes after they have logged in?
They are cool. But take up tons of bandwidth on you network. If you have say 25 of those 50 people log on at the same time how many file servers will you need to support all that data transfer.
What if you have like 300 users and half long on within like 5 minutes of each other.
The other problem is the log in time. The more users loging on at the same time the longer it will take to pull each profile down to each machine.
Can be messy! And SLOW!
Roaming profile’s annoy me because they cause wierd problems and also fill themselves up with things like temp internet files! Here at work im constantly re-creating profiles because users complain about it taking ages to log into the network and so on….
Needs a central Profile registery.
I work for the IT dept at a university. We don’t have the money or resources for the huge bandwidth required for roaming profiles. We do redirect some directories (My Documents, Application Data, etc.) to network shares which helps, but it doesn’t solve the problem. Also the article talks about user education to solve the problem. Yes it might help, but there are technical solutions to this problem and user education just seems like a cop-out work around. We finally just did away with roaming profiles for the hassle they caused. They are not the holy grail this article makes them out to be. The Unix approach it much better IMHO. Microsoft should follow suit and have something similar. It would also help with networks like ours that have both windows and unix computers. That’s just my opinion.
Why is this a big deal? Like I always suspected Windows is just an antiquated piece of hype with a pretty GUI. Home directories were part of the original design of Unix way back in 1969. In my last job I had 21,000 engineers and support staff who could log in to their account from anywhere in the company using NFS on Unix. Any authorized person sitting before any Unix workstation anywhere in this huge and widely distributed company (read thousands of miles wide) could log in and get full access to their files and applications sitting on centralized servers.
Today NFS is considered so last century. People who care are talking about NFS over SSH/SSL , WebFS or VPN distributed world wide. Can any one remind me once again why this
Roaming profiles thing makes news?
Romaing profiles can be a very good thing, however the implementation / details suck wind. Saving money because there aren’t enough PC’ or what not. The problem becomes, network storage and bandwidth. Giving users 20 megs when each user has a 10 gig drive or more to store data. Most users are going to store it on their drive. When that drive goes bad, ntloader corrupts (or whatever) then romaing profiles don’t do much.
Great a user can get back to work instantly but what they were working on is lost as well as the data that has been accumulated over time. FTA: 20 megs is a popular number.
20 megs? reality check is needed.
Sum it up, romaning profiles don’t mean much if you don’t have the infrastructure to accomadate it.
1) Space
2) Bandwidth
Yes, these would be managment issues with Space and Bandwidth; however these are extended implications of using romaing profiles that most people do not take into account.
You know what they say: Microsoft is destined to re-invent UNIX…badly.
A RUP corruption is preventing access to Outlook and my email, and until my hard drive is rebuilt I cannot get in to turn it off. So, for the last couple of days I’ve been toast. Easier? Save bacon? For whom? Not me. It is the CAUSE of my problems. (And forget the long boot and shutdown times, that’s another story.)
I found roaming profiles to be the most annoying thing every created.
Users tend to put their files in “my documents” which is downloaded to the local computer every time they login. This can be hell when users have upwards of 1GB of files.
“You know what they say: Microsoft is destined to re-invent UNIX…badly. ”
Its funny really, wasn’t it about 20yrs ago that MS once had a pretty credible Unix story in Xenix IIRC (even before Windows v 1). Its been so long that a love of one technology turns into a hatred of it. I don’t suppose anyone at MS even remembers Xenix except BG.
Now they have a so called Unix license with (senior moment), you would think they could exploit Unix far more, rather than try to keep turning things upside down.
my 2c
A lot of misconceptions or design errors live with the commenters on this article. Please people, refrain from posting if you have no clue.
A roaming profile on average is about 5MB large. It consists basically of an ntuser.dat and some assorted junk in Application Data. It grows, sure, but not to the behemoths people claim it to grow to…well, they can, but that’s generally to blame on the administrator. Local Settings (which includes all temporary directories, but sadly also UsrClass.dat) is excluded by default, and I do hope you people left it that way. My Documents *is not* part of the profile and should be redirected to a network share. Note that a redirection doesn’t mean a local copy is pulled over the network. Those are offline files, and that’s an entirely different beast. UsrClass.dat missing can be worked around by making sure nothing important ever gets installed in HKCUSoftwareClasses.
I just checked my own (insanely polluted) roaming profile. It’s 17.7MB large on disk. The biggest culprits: ntuser.dat with 5.5MB and a few directories in Application DataMicrosoft. For an average user (i.e. everyone but administrators) it seems to hover around 3MB. Nothing I lose sleep over.
BTW, why is this a topic on osnews.com? It doesn’t really seem to be news nor OS related.
Obviously you don’t have users saving entire directories to their desktop, and you have NTP working on your network. My experience with Roaming Profiles goes as far back as Windows NT, and if implemented incorrectly can be a nightmare.
We just upgraded to Windows XP and someone decided that 30 MB was a sufficient profile size. Well that is until Mozilla puts its cache (which can be changed) and Exceed puts its fonts into subdirectories that are part of the profile. It all depends on what you are using in terms of desktop software and your Group Policy.
I have had nothing but problems with them. My company used them, and continues to use them today. When ever someone calls up having a problem with one I turn it off and they never know. Most will use the exact same computer for years at a time anyways.
I’ve done the roaming user thing since 1994 on UNIX. The news value of this feature is zero.
RUPs without stringent requirements about what exactly it is that’s being saved to the profile are just resident evil.
User education. Could I sneer any harder? Unless you have the environment [tons of engineers in a UNIX network] this problem won’t exist. In an office environment where the CEO acts more like a crime lord than an administrator and without clue 1 about what the hell it is that he’s doing, I want to see you make this work without giving your admin an ulcer.
And the other users: they’re busy being overworked and overstressed. If there’s anything they care less about than whether your shitty IT system can jump through the hoops without going flat on its face, I don’t know what that is. They DO NOT CARE !!! They cannot be bothered. The sooner you get that through your skull the better. Or they’ll want things from it that it was manifestly not designed to do and INSIST that it can do that very thing regardless of the spec.
Just disable all that junk and give them nothing more than the strictest minimum. And they’ll find a way to screw that up too.
Users, death’s too good for them.
Ah yes, what you say is of course correct. Incorrect implementations of a technology which in essence is sensitive to configuration problems will always cause problems. If implemented correctly, roaming profiles stay small and manageable.
I’m the first to admit it’s a lot of work to get right and to keep it running. Applications must be tested and where possible reconfigured to play nice. Heck, every single application offered on my desktop has been touched by an application specialist…and repackaged where necessary (and it always is). And no, users are not allowed to save shit to their desktop…or anywhere else but their user share on the network for that matter.
roaming profiles are great when the enduser saves everything to the desktop saves every email ever sent, or the “my documents” folder actually resides on their profile instead of the profile. sure is great for them to load up a 2 to 4 gig profile. then when you get 3 or for those guys logging on to the same computer, eventually it runs out of disk space :p
At one job we had roaming profiles and redirected the My Docs to servers as well. The roaming profiles were great as users could fly to an office half way accross the coutry , log in and be set. Doing My Docs remotely and having users sync up every time was a nightmare.
I’ve found that roaming profiles have made my life much easier when it comes to switching or replacing computers. I no longer have people calling me because their desktop icons are different, or they’ve lost their office settings. Saves a lot of time too since I don’t have to manually copy over data and nothing gets missed.
>>”my documents” which is downloaded to the local computer every time they login.
remap “my documents” so that it’s on a mapped server drive.
my documents sits on a server which is backed up. there’s no huge transfer of data everytime they log in.
problem solved.
and you people call yourselves windows admins.
-zaz
comptia linux+, rhce, ccnp
my documents sits on a server which is backed up. there’s no huge transfer of data everytime they log in.
So how do you teach your users to not create pst files in Application Data/Microsoft/Outlook?
It seems to me that Roaming Profiles are much like the rest of things Windows when compared to things Unix. At first they appear easy for the admins to set up (you just check “roaming profiles”). Then the admin has to change a bunch of stuff on every PC (policies). Then the user has to be careful they don’t put stuff in the wrong place. The Unix world admittedly can be difficult to set things up for the admin (AFS, NFS+NIS, LDAP), but once it’s done, it’s nearly transparent to the user.
<quote>It seems to me that Roaming Profiles are much like the rest of things Windows when compared to things Unix.</quote>
And to me it seems that many Unix-people have no idea about important concepts realized in Windows.
For example in this case – in every book about ADS, there _will_ be a chapter ’bout roaming Profiles and how to redirect specific subfolders of user profiles (this is an integrated feature in ADS, no special trick).
So STFU if you’ve got nothing to say exept complete b*******.
Roaming profiles are handy if you keep all your stuff in the default locations. Being able to take your desktop to any workstation in your domain is fantastic!
But all this talk about roaming profiles using too much network resources, and taking bandwidth. I just don’t see it.
In the latest releases of Windows it still creates a profile locally to the machine, then incrementally (I believe) updates the profile stored on the server. So there wouldn’t be that much network traffic. Possibly a spike on first logon and on logoff.
But really, having roaming profiles gives you an option to add that to your weekly backups, making sure personal data is safe and a quick workstation recovery time if one bites the dust.
Personally I hate Windows profiles, they always seem to fail, or get corrupted. I can’t even count how many times I’ve had to recreate profiles. I hate them!
>>So how do you teach your users to not create pst files in Application Data/Microsoft/Outlook?
pst files are on the server as well. set internet cache to a very small amount. write some scripts that keep certain items purged from user profiles.
Just another “Nifty” Windows feature that will not work correctly if you login as less than an admin. Because of this and other problems with it our shop as done away with this “nifty” feature.
Just another proof that Windows is still just a “toy OS” under the hood.
Is there a GUI term server for Linux?
where you could log in to a single server and get information pushed to another box?
and im not talking just SSH
“A”
“So how do you teach your users to not create pst files in Application Data/Microsoft/Outlook?”
You create a PRF file which gets loaded into outlook which puts the default location of PRF file somewhere else…like a user share on the network. It’s all very simple, really, if you know where to look.
Yes, all these little bits of information should be gathered somewhere sometime. I actually considered doing it once.
Of course as an admin you’ll need the commitment of your users and more importantly the management to implement a highly managed windows infrastructure as opposed to hodgepodge of halfass solutions because $management is afraid to confront $users with limitations on what they can do. Because honestly, users suck.
Two words,
Folder Redirection.
Add a few group policies and you get the benifit with out the bandwidth. I reconfigured a schools’s network with 30+ laptops connecting over wireless (11b) and it works surprisingly well.
Other than a once in blue moon corrupted profile (which is easier to recreate than reformat/image a users hard drive while they sit & wait)… this has been a usefull feature.
Folder redirection of My Docs to thier home drive and all is good (remember, after the 1st sync only CHANGES get replicated, not the whole data set).
As for .pst… what are you doing using pst’s anyway if you are running a network or having rights to do so? (i.e. Exchange!). Yes, for archiving reasons some of our users have pst, but they are on a network share.
I agree what was stated before… some have no clue how to admin Windows.