[OpenAFS] Roaming Windows Profiles

[Dj Merrill]

Rodney M Dyer wrote:

> 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
>
>

Hi Rodney,
    Thanks for the additional info.  I should have mentioned that all of
our machines are Win2k SP2, not XP.  Checking the quota at login
is a good idea.  Our system is slightly different than yours in that
we are using a Samba server as our login authenticator, and have
some background scripts to keep the Samba and AFS logins sync'ed.
However, it seems the end result is similar to your setup.


    Pardon my ignorance since I am not an expert in Windows, but how
do you setup folder redirection from the local machine back into
AFS in the profile?  I believe that if we could redirect the
desktop and My Docs area in every users profile, most of the issues we 
had would be resolved.

Thanks,

-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