XP Persistent Roaming Profile

[Satanic Atheist]

Hi,

I've now changed my laptop to a more up-to-date model and handed off my old one to my girlfriend. I have enabled Samba based network logons with a domain, but if any experts out there could tell me how I could allow her to use persistent domain logons then I'd be very grateful.

What I would like to achieve is simply that if she logs onto the laptop whilst it isn't connected to the domain/network then she can use her locally stored profile. When she logs off, her settings and documents will be stored, but when she logs onto the network again, it will be updated to reflect the changes.

Also, I have her "My Documents" folder mapped to the Z:/ drive (which is her Linux home directory on the Samba server) so how will this be affected?

I appreciate that this is probably a Windows XP issue/setting, but I am running a Linux Samba backend to control logons and it's working fantastically.

I've looked on Google and the cross-platform support isn't that great and I only have 10 days to get this (and myself) sorted out before I disappear again.

Any help would be gratefully received,

James

[trilarian]

I don't have the answer, but more of a suggestion if you are going towards roaming profiles. Luckily for me, I haven't had to adminster windows machines to any great depth for awhile now. However, when I did I remember when our IT guy moved everyone's PC's to roaming profiles at my work(roughly 150 computers). The profile server could not handle the load and often failed. However our admin had it set at the time would cause windows to try to connect for about 5 minutes before using the local profile. This caused an extra 10 minutes for a reboot(5 to save, 5 to load)!!! Lucky for him, he happened to switch the night before a windows update that required machines to reboot... haha you can imagine the fun.

Anyway, point being before you leave your girlfriend with that setup, try to reboot her computer with your profile server under high load and again off to make sure she will be able to boot quickly if the profile server is not available.

P.S. For the My Documents, it's been my expierence from a windows > Linux connection, that you have to enter the user/pass after a reboot before your programs can access the share. Depending on how savy she is, you may want to script that. Some programs that are expecting files in that folder may crash when the share is not available.

EDIT => Forgot to pass this (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314478) link on roaming profiles.

[Crito]

When logging in the roaming profile will always overwrite the local profile. Only when logging out does the local profile overwrite the one stored on the network. That's by design and what you're asking sounds like the exact opposite (local overwriting roaming on login.) So I'm going to have to say it's not possible (for the user to do.) You could login remotely as a domain admin and manually copy the local profile to the network share before she logged in, but that's obviously a kludgy way to work.

[Satanic Atheist]

Thanks for the replies.

It turns out that XP is much easier to work with when consider Roaming Profiles that 2000 ever was. If I log on as her (forgot to create my own account! D'oh!) with the network support, it pulls down the profile (as it should). However, when I log on without network support, it correctly uses the local copy of the profile. She'll rarely change anything when she's not connected to the network, so there shouldn't be much of a problem.

The best part of all is, as Samba should, it correctly maps her network home drive to Z: but even allows you to use this off-line! It gets synchronised when she logs back on again.

Again, thanks for the replies, but it was a lot less hassle than I initially thought it would,

Regards,

James