[OpenAFS] Roaming Windows Profiles

[Rodney M Dyer]

Dj,

Yes, we've got AFS quota on all our users.  We have it setup so that every 
user has 100 Meg quota.  When the users logon, before the profile downloads 
out of AFS space, we check the quota  to see if they are over quota 
already.  We don't let them logon if they are over quota and a mail message 
is sent from the user's machine to an admin about the logon problem.  If 
they are close to exceeding their quota limit then we give them a very 
terse message about cleaning up and allow them to logon.

If they go over quota during their session, then logout, XP will try to 
save what it can to their AFS space.  In the case where the profile is too 
big, XP errors (silently) and just switches their profile to a permanently 
local one on the machine they are on.  This does cause some problems with 
our users, but not many.  (Note:  I find this behavior odd because we have 
the group policy setup so that local profiles aren't allowed....going to 
have to call Microsoft on this one.)  To fix this problem we end up fixing 
their quota problem manually and pulling their most recently good profile 
from AFS backup.  Btw, our XP machines never "lock-up" at logout as you 
say.  XP will log an event viewer message that the filespace was exceeded 
at logout.

Yes, quota can be a problem with the roaming profile system since it wasn't 
designed for use with a one-sided quota system.  When you use a real 
Microsoft filesystem share to save user quota's I think I've read in a 
knowledge base article that the server has special profile mechanisms to 
keep bad things from happening (most of the time).

We minimize what gets stored in our users profiles by using folder 
redirection and logout exclusion lists.  Most user profiles should be from 
1 to 8 Meg, anything greater can cause logon/logoffs to take a long time as 
well as use up valuable network bandwidth.

Microsoft did make some changes to the profile system when they moved to XP 
that caused us some headaches, but I was able to code around those for 
now.  Microsoft is currently working out a few actual bugs that appear when 
you logout of the XP system and save profiles.

Umm, I can say more, but I need specifics...

Rodney

Rodney M. Dyer
x86 Systems Programmer
College of Engineering Computing Services
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Email rmdyer@uncc.edu
Phone (704)687-3518
Help Desk Line (704)687-3150
FAX (704)687-2352
Office  267 Smith Building

At 04:51 PM 2/5/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Rodney M Dyer wrote:
>
>>A windows profile is just a single directory store of information.
>>You can pretty safely store the profile in the user's UNIX home 
>>directory.  We just called ours "xp_profile".  When you logon, Windows 
>>sucks the profile directory and everything in it to the local 
>>machine.  When you logout, everything that changed is sync'ed back to AFS 
>>space.
>
>
>Hi Rodney,
>    We tried something similar to your approach last summer, and ran into 
> some problems.
>I'm curious if you were able to solve them.
>We have disk quotas on our user accounts.
>When someone logged in, their profile was copied to the local
>client hard drive.  They create some files on the local profile,
>large enough to exceed their disk quota.  When they logged out,
>the machine attempted to copy the files back to AFS space, but
>could not due to the quota limitation.  So the machine just hung forever, 
>until someone
>hit the reset button.  Then there were problems with that account
>logging back in until an admin went in and either cleaned up some
>space in their home dir, or increased the disk quota.
>
>    Have you run into this, and if so, how did you fix it?
>We just gave up and told people to save to the AFS mapped
>drive, otherwise there was a chance their files could go bye-bye
>since the lab machines get wiped and rebuilt once or twice per year.
>
>-Dj
>
>
>--
>Dj Merrill                          Thayer School of Engineering
>ThUG Sr. Unix Systems Administrator 8000 Cummings Hall
>deej@thayer.dartmouth.edu - N1JOV   Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH  03755
>
>"On the side of the software box, in the 'System Requirements' section, it
>said 'Requires Windows 95 or better'. So I installed Linux."   - Anonymous
>
>