Roaming Profiles - help please

[robbied69]

Hi, I have just taken over a little network of about 20 machines. This is my first time managing a network. I have been asked to implement roaming profiles so that everything gets backed up to the server. I have done a little bit of reasearch today on the subject and was wondering if some people could give me a few tips and hints.

Basically my aim is to create a default user profile where everyone has the same desktop applied to them when I create a new user.

What is the best way of doing this? anything I should know about the permissions on the server for redirecting the my documents folder etc.

Any help will be greatly appreciated as I don't want to fiddle about too much.

 

[killians45]

There should already be a default profile called user for AD. Look into the actual profile, you can use it as a template if you wish. Now, that is for a generic setup, as each person has his account created, just assign him the permissions that the user/power user/admin or whatever you need and then set this person to a roaming profile.

 

[Osiris]

You may want to decide against it unless you cant change his mind

here are some reasons why

roaming profiles consume disk space

Roaming profiles must be replicated to all domain controllers. If a user's profile is a mandatory profile, it must be available in order for the user to logon.

When the RP is not found, all kinds of errors can appear

Roaming profiles may not work well for your domain if your users logon using various computers that have different software configurations. For example, an application package may be installed in one directory on one computer and in another directory on another computer. Therefore the environment PATH variable may not be able to find the application when the user is using one of the two computers. However if a uniform network environment is set up, these drawbacks can be overcome. the guest account and accounts administrator cannot have roaming profiles.

And there are a few security risks involved with this also

 

[robbied69]

TBH disk space is not an issue. What I have done now, is set up a user customized everything and saved it as the default user. I have created a share on the server to store the profiles on. I have used folder redirection GPO to redirect their My Documents and Desktop straight to the server. Everything appears to be working hunky dory now.

Thanks for everyones assistance.