Best way to redirect roaming profiles to local.

Zoomer

I was told, against my advice, to make it so everyone's my docs, desktop, app data, etc get stored on the server by syncronization or roaming profiles. Now the network is slow whenever people are trying to get on the internet and are yelling at me. "The network is slow! Why?"

Anyways, what is the easiest way to redirect everyone's profiles back to their local computer? Right now everyone's data is synced to the server and not saved locally. For example, to transfer everyone's my docs, desktop, etc back to their local computers and not constantly sync during login and logoff?

Mishra

How are you doing the synchronization exactly?

Daniel333

Are you mapping their My Documents folder to the network drive or are they re-downloading it? If not, give that a shot before you go through the trouble or redirecting everyone back to local profiles.

Zoomer

I used Folder Redirection in group policy and created user folders to redirect them to.

dynamik

Have you identified the bottleneck? Is everyone opening large files? How many users are there?

Mishra

Are the people with roaming profiles yelling that everything is slow or are the people using the folder redirection yelling? Is it both?

If it is both, it could be that your server is just really slow. Usually the folder redirection is a pretty performance positive way of storing files on a central location because all you are doing is mapping to the server to get your files. It isn't actually synchronizing anything like a roaming profile does. It is just like when you map a drive, it works quickly and well.

Sometimes, when I map a drive it takes a while for something to resolve (sometimes its the DCs, sometimes its DNS/NETBIOS resolution/sometimes it is server load). You might want to try that on a few PCs that are experiencing slowness that do NOT have roaming profiles.

Zoomer

Upon looking again, I do not see any roaming profiles enabled. It's just being accomplished with folder redirection. Yet everyone is yelling at me that the internet is slow. Could the folder redirection be slowing down everyone's internet access? There's about 30 people connecting to the internet through CAT5 patch panels and older Linksys 10/100 fast ethernet switches.

That whole area is a mess and whoever installed it didn't document anything. So, do you think it's a combination of everything. Could redirecting folders back to local computers "patch" it up for now?

brad-

Whatever your profile situation, i think that would only hit your pipes at logon/logoff...and if your MyDocs are syncing as in Offline files, it too would only be at logon/logoff + when files are accessed/saved.

If it is web that is slow, the problem is probably somewhere else. When they access files through shares is that equally as slow? I dont have a tool to suggest, but you might could try to find something to sniff it out.

Maybe you need to use something ISA as a proxy...just throwing out ideas.