AD, roaming profiles, several locations and poor links

Hi all,

I've got a setup here where everyone uses roaming profiles. I also have several locations feeding into a single domain. So far, no big problem, as the employees are pretty much static. However, a few of us do go between locations, and the less technical of the bunch would like to log in with their user name without it taking a long time to download their profile.

My initial thought was to fake dns entries at the specific sites so my file servers all appeared as the same name when the system went and tried to get a profile. However, given that this is ADS, I believe there to be encryption and auth problems with this approach.

I was wondering if anybody else had run into this problem and how you worked with it. Thanks for any input!

Sean

I think tyically you would look at putting each location in a diffrent site if they don't have a high speed WAN link. Then you could use DFS and FRS to replicate the users roaming profiles.

This isn't really a solution as much as a work around, but the other thing to do is make sure the profiles are as small as possible by excluding the stuff you don't need via group policy. The biggest one is the "Temporary Internet Files" which is included by default.

GPO's to reduce the size of the profile is one good suggestion. You may also consider moving some of your folks to Terminal Server instead of full desktops. In fact, strategically it might make sense in the long run to move to a centralized model with all data and applications in your main location, and all users running on Terminal Services.

Probably a more ambitious solution than what you were looking for.....