hello again people need some help with profiles building up on machines.

hi everyone,

im an apprentice tech at a college and this problem is abit above my head but we but we use roaming profiles and everytime someone logs on to a machine it stores thier profile in users and it is starting to cause a problem by slowing log on times down. dose anyone know of a way to stop the profiles being stored or to be deleted automaticly your help would be much appreciated.

Find more posts tagged with

Free for TechExams community: Cybersecurity salary guide

Compare cert salaries and plan your next career move

Button

Comments

Turgon

andyjudd1 wrote: »

hi everyone,

im an apprentice tech at a college and this problem is abit above my head but we but we use roaming profiles and everytime someone logs on to a machine it stores thier profile in users and it is starting to cause a problem by slowing log on times down. dose anyone know of a way to stop the profiles being stored or to be deleted automaticly your help would be much appreciated.

Roaming profiles where the bane of our lives in NT 4.0 days. But it's been a long time so I cant help you. Im sure with the AD advancements and group policies there are solutions for you. Expect a few people to reply to this. Failing that try the Windows forums!

andyjudd1

haha my boss was telling me that he was saying IT is so much easier now days it feels like there's a lost skill there somewhere thank for your help.

ptilsen

Are you saying its storing a copy of the profile locally?

There is a GP that will turn off Offline Files -- effectively, almost every profile file is accessed over the network, rather than cached locally and synchronized. Keep in mind, this can make things slower post-login, but it should speed up login and logoff, in most cases. It really depends on the environment.

NOLAJ

ptilsen wrote: »

Are you saying its storing a copy of the profile locally?

There is a GP that will turn off Offline Files -- effectively, almost every profile file is accessed over the network, rather than cached locally and synchronized. Keep in mind, this can make things slower post-login, but it should speed up login and logoff, in most cases. It really depends on the environment.

Absolutely, Group Policy should be enabled to stop the profile from being saved locally. Roaming profiles should be pulling their info from a server, i.e. a FS, and loading from there. No reason for storing information locally, unless it's a standalone machine and certain users need rights for something tied to that machine, i.e. applications. Pretty easy fix.

Now obviously if someone needs to work off the domain, things need to be cached locally....sorry I'm rambling.

Easy fix!

MentholMoose

Roaming profiles work fine as long as the network is stable and profiles doesn't get too big. One quick fix may be to implement folder redirection for certain directories (e.g. My Documents) instead of having them stored in the profile. This will help keep profile size down and reduce load time.

joshmadakor

MentholMoose wrote: »

Roaming profiles work fine as long as the network is stable and profiles doesn't get too big. One quick fix may be to implement folder redirection for certain directories (e.g. My Documents) instead of having them stored in the profile. This will help keep profile size down and reduce load time.

This. We do this where I work.

Also, there's a policy that will automatically delete the profile after x days. But you must have at least Vista.
http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/6527/deleteoldprofiles.png

dustinmurphy

My last company used a Terminal services farm with roaming profiles. The problem with roaming profiles is that each time the user logs into the computer, it copies the entire profile to the local users directory. AFAIK, there is no way around this. The login times are so long because the roaming profiles have become larger in size, and each time the user logs into a computer for the first time, it will have to copy the entire profile. If the user's profile is already stored on the computer from a previous login, as long as the registry has the user correctly setup, it will only copy the changes made. We overcame the slowness by using a big pipe between the servers and our file server (also having it on a 16-drive RAID6 helped). We used the group policy to delete the user's profile after they logged off so that we wouldn't fill up our server's small drives with profile info.

I would say a good solution would be as someone pointed out.. using folder redirection for at LEAST Documents. I would also look at your network infrastructure to see if it needs to be upgraded as well as your file server to make sure you're not over running it's capabilities. If you have the ability, TEAM the NIC's on the fileserver as well. We had a Cisco 6509 connecting our FS to our TS farm, so we had plenty of bandwidth to handle the traffic. The key is to keep the amount of data moved from the profile as low as possible.

NewManSoon

Disable offline files ,and make use of redirected folders.

SubnetZero

Please talk your boss into migrating away from roaming profiles and redirect folders instead!!

Profile and Folder Redirection In Windows Server 2003

After you enable roaming profiles for a couple of users, the first thing that you will probably notice is that logins and log offs become extremely slow for those users. The reason for this is that the user’s profile is actually being maintained in multiple locations.

The first time that a user logs in after roaming profiles have been enabled, a roaming profile does not exist for the user, so Windows uses the profile that’s stored in the local C:\Documents and Settings\ folder. When the user logs off, the entire contents of the local profile (minus the Internet Explorer cache) is copied to the server. If the user has lots of big files, this process can take a long time to complete.

The next time that the user logs on, a roaming profile does exist. The roaming profile takes precedence over any local profile that might exist. Therefore, the entire profile is copied from the server to the local C:\Documents and Settings folder as a part of the login process. As before, if the user has a lot of large files, this can take a long time to complete. I have personally seen situations in which a login has taken over an hour because the user’s profile was so massive.

Once the login process completes, the user works off of the local copy of the profile (which is now a mirror of the network copy). However, it’s very possible that the user could modify the profile by creating a document, placing an icon on the desktop, changing wallpapers, or whatever. Therefore, Windows considers the local profile to be the most current and copies it to the network when the user logs off.

The solution to obscenely long logons and log offs is to use folder redirection. Folder redirection allows you to save portions of the user’s profile in a different location on the network. The advantage to using folder redirection is that once a folder has been redirected to an alternate location, it no longer has to be copied every time that the user logs on or off. Windows just understands that those particular folders will always reside on the network. Windows will only touch those folders when it needs to open a file from one of them.

You can’t redirect every folder in a user’s profile, but you can redirect the ones that tend to be the largest and take the longest to copy each time a user logs in or out. The folders that you can redirect are Application Data, Desktop, My Documents, and Start Menu.

You can actually redirect these folders to a user’s local profile, but that defeats the purpose of implementing roaming profiles. Therefore, I recommend creating a share point on the server to which you can redirect these folders. Creating a share point for folder redirection is a lot easier than creating a share point for roaming profiles. Basically, you can just create a folder, share it, and give everyone full control at the share level.

The actual folder redirection is done through the group policy. To redirect a folder, open the Group Policy Editor and navigate to User Settings | Windows Settings | Folder Redirection. The group policy requires you to redirect each of the four folders separately, but the procedure for doing so is the same for each folder. Set the folder’s Setting option to Basic – Redirect Everyone’s Folder To The Same Location. Next, select the Create A Folder For Each User Under The Root Path option from the Target Folder Location drop down list. Finally, enter your root path in the place provided. For example, on my test server, I just created a share called USERS on a server named TAZMANIA. Therefore, I entered \\TAZMANIA\USERS as the root path. If you look at Figure B, you will notice that in the example under the root path, Windows automatically fills in the user name and the folder name. This occurs because Windows will automatically create all of the necessary folders and will set the required permissions as well.

whatthehell

SubnetZero wrote: »

Please talk your boss into migrating away from roaming profiles and redirect folders instead!!

Profile and Folder Redirection In Windows Server 2003

After you enable roaming profiles for a couple of users, the first thing that you will probably notice is that logins and log offs become extremely slow for those users. The reason for this is that the user’s profile is actually being maintained in multiple locations.

The first time that a user logs in after roaming profiles have been enabled, a roaming profile does not exist for the user, so Windows uses the profile that’s stored in the local C:\Documents and Settings\ folder. When the user logs off, the entire contents of the local profile (minus the Internet Explorer cache) is copied to the server. If the user has lots of big files, this process can take a long time to complete.

The next time that the user logs on, a roaming profile does exist. The roaming profile takes precedence over any local profile that might exist. Therefore, the entire profile is copied from the server to the local C:\Documents and Settings folder as a part of the login process. As before, if the user has a lot of large files, this can take a long time to complete. I have personally seen situations in which a login has taken over an hour because the user’s profile was so massive.

Once the login process completes, the user works off of the local copy of the profile (which is now a mirror of the network copy). However, it’s very possible that the user could modify the profile by creating a document, placing an icon on the desktop, changing wallpapers, or whatever. Therefore, Windows considers the local profile to be the most current and copies it to the network when the user logs off.

The solution to obscenely long logons and log offs is to use folder redirection. Folder redirection allows you to save portions of the user’s profile in a different location on the network. The advantage to using folder redirection is that once a folder has been redirected to an alternate location, it no longer has to be copied every time that the user logs on or off. Windows just understands that those particular folders will always reside on the network. Windows will only touch those folders when it needs to open a file from one of them.

You can’t redirect every folder in a user’s profile, but you can redirect the ones that tend to be the largest and take the longest to copy each time a user logs in or out. The folders that you can redirect are Application Data, Desktop, My Documents, and Start Menu.

You can actually redirect these folders to a user’s local profile, but that defeats the purpose of implementing roaming profiles. Therefore, I recommend creating a share point on the server to which you can redirect these folders. Creating a share point for folder redirection is a lot easier than creating a share point for roaming profiles. Basically, you can just create a folder, share it, and give everyone full control at the share level.

The actual folder redirection is done through the group policy. To redirect a folder, open the Group Policy Editor and navigate to User Settings | Windows Settings | Folder Redirection. The group policy requires you to redirect each of the four folders separately, but the procedure for doing so is the same for each folder. Set the folder’s Setting option to Basic – Redirect Everyone’s Folder To The Same Location. Next, select the Create A Folder For Each User Under The Root Path option from the Target Folder Location drop down list. Finally, enter your root path in the place provided. For example, on my test server, I just created a share called USERS on a server named TAZMANIA. Therefore, I entered \\TAZMANIA\USERS as the root path. If you look at Figure B, you will notice that in the example under the root path, Windows automatically fills in the user name and the folder name. This occurs because Windows will automatically create all of the necessary folders and will set the required permissions as well.

Great info! +1 for you!

CodeBlox

At my job on the helpdesk, I find that the only thing that "roams" with the "roaming profiles" is the problems. Users unable to log in because some how their file share permissions were jacked, the D drive permissions get screwed, or as in your problem, there because a point where there are too many local copies of the roaming profile stored on the computer. This eventually prevents anyone else from logging into the computer. Really, not much at all roams with the profiles on our network and I feel like they should do away with it. Thank god they will be with the windows 7 deployment.