school me on network login

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cj3waker

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Hey guys my google-fu wasnt giving me much info on this so Im looking for a little help in the right direction.

local network as work is a mess. We run through loads of different pcs and myself and others are getting sick of setting up an account and ftping all the necessary files from our servers to set up each pc.

I want to set up basic network login through windows. so on any pc any user can login with his credentials and have access to all their normal files. Only consideration I can think of is the range of pcs we use and the difference in hardware and drivers.

any helpful hints on where to start reading up on this?
 
By server, do you mean dedicated server OS such as Windows Server 2003/2008/2012? If so, set up an Active Directory Domain, add computers to the domain, set up Roaming profiles, and create the office users accounts.

You're gonna have to do some reading, but it is pretty simple stuff. There are many tutorials online about setting up and configuring Active Directory.

If using some variation of a Linux OS environment, you can use something like Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). I honestly don't know too much about it, but that should be enough to get you started.
 
Noooooo. Do not use roaming profiles. Redirect their my documents to their own network "home" folder. Tell them anything not saved in there is not backed up and not your problem if it gets deleted or goes missing. The only thing you need to worry about then is copying their favorites over.
 
The least expensive method would be to set up a Samba file share on a linux based server. AD is not necessary for basic file shares. LDAP is only necessary if you want to authenticate Samba against an AD environment.
 
For the user accounts you can configure AD DS and then sort your users into OUs. After that you can use Group Policy to send out applications and I believe even files based on OU. Also you can set up a file share through windows server and allow access rights based through security groups.


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How many users are we talking? If you have a windows server then setting up AD is fairly trivial given you prepare how group policy handles their documents. I love roaming profiles because at any given time I can change out a desktop if it breaks and the user can log right back in anywhere with zero downtime. It is best used in an environment where all the machines are identical software wise. This doesn't sound like the case for you so stick with simple folder redirection and pound into people's heads that they need to save to their Documents folder otherwise the data will be lost.
 
/usr/home said:
Noooooo. Do not use roaming profiles. Redirect their my documents to their own network "home" folder. Tell them anything not saved in there is not backed up and not your problem if it gets deleted or goes missing. The only thing you need to worry about then is copying their favorites over.
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Agreed. Roaming profiles come with a whole subset of potential problems. Which is simply a nice way of saying they are a pain in the ass.

Useful, at times. But I avoid them like the plague because they increase administrative overhead significantly.
 
Lets say we set up a pc for normal use on the local disk, install windows, drivers etc. then would you be able to do a roaming profile that took advantage of the hardware and software (drivers on the pc) just have your login environment all loaded in over the server. so if I was to log onto a different pc that also had a clean install on the local disk everything would run smoothly?

Or would that profile have to have all the drivers for all the possible hardware installed onto its profile? and that would seem acceptable as well? since the drivers wouldnt load unless the hardware was detected?
 
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Roaming profiles caches user files on the server- no drivers, mostly the 'my' folders stuff. Files/folders are synchronized at login/log-off.
If the user logs into the same computer they logged off of, nothing much happens. If the user logs into a different computer, their user files are copied over/synched. If you further integrate with AD, you can do Install on Demand for needed programs and what not.
I like Roaming Profiles because they are transparent to the user and have generally seen them as trouble-free. If your AD is solid, you shouldn't have major problems with Roaming Profiles.
Any new/different functionality will have its own pain points, just pick your poison.
 
The biggest problem with roaming profiles is the software on the PCs.

I have an app that requires almost a gig of files to be stored in the users profile.

Which means every time a user logs on or logs off, they transfer a gig of data to/from the server.

In a small environment, that might be OK. But if 30 people all come in Monday morning and login at the same time it'll be lunch time before their login will complete.
 
Most AD installs implement folder sync / offline folders rather than roaming profiles these days, or plain home folder redirects. Roaming profiles are NASTY bad if you keep any data at all on the machine, and really add a lot of time to the logon/off process.
 
You can even redirect the favorites folder with windows 7. Caution though, with some of our remote sites it added about 3 mins to the login process. Local sites were fine. Just our sites that are 5 and 10 meg took a long time so we scrapped the idea.
 
Another problem with roaming profiles is not only are they sometimes large size wise, as someone said 1GB+, they can also be 10's of thousands of files as well which are a lot of IOPS on the file server when someone logs on or off. Lots of programs shit up the roaming profile folder, either through bad programming practices or outright intentionally (i.e. the normal version stores all 10000 temp files in the roaming folder while the "pro" version which is pretty much identical but costs 10x more stores them properly in the local folder)
 
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