[Techtalk] Desktop support sucks

Dominik Schramm dominik.schramm at gmxpro.net
Mon Dec 22 22:55:23 EST 2003


Hi,

"Pamela Talene Hale" <tallists at myway.com> writes:
> I need to fix it so that ALL the files these people save are stored
> on the network.  Moving the "my documents" folder was no problem, of
> course, but isn't there a way to move the Desktop as well?  The last
> time I had to do anything like this, we were running WinNT, I think,
> but we had the desktop pointed to each person's directory on the
> network so that if their machine crashed, we could ghost it back up
> again and all their files would be (hopefully) safe and sound on the
> big network drive with the nightly backups.

The desktop is a folder in the user's profile by default
(called Desktop).
This in turn normally resides in C:\Documents and Settings\username.

The easiest way to solve your problem would be to make all the
profiles "roaming". This means they are copied to a network location
specified in the user's Active Directory object. I'm assuming a
Windows 2000 domain here, so this only works if there is a Domain
Controller in your network.

If you don't have one, then you could...  

1. Connect a network drive, find the registry key that says where the
Deskop is and adjust it to point to the network drive or some of its
subfolders.

If you speak German, this link might help: www.winfaq.de
(There's a longer explanation on how to do this)

Storing the complete "Documents and Settings" folder somewhere else
seems not to be officially supported, not after installation at least.

But see these MS knowledge base articles:
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=236621
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=242557


2. Use the linkd command to "link" the directory c:\doc...\username to
a subfolder of the user's home directory (which has to be connected as
network drive). By doing so, everthing in the profile is stored on the
server, also e.g. his/her Internet Explorer bookmarks, which are
somewhere in <profile>\application data afaik.


> 
> Is it just not possible to do this in Win2k, or is there some trick
> to it, or does anyone know?
> 

I could answer you more specifically if you mentioned:
1. if you have a domain controller (and which OS)
2. if the users already have a home directory on the network


> Oh yeah, and happy/merry whatever to you all.  Pick a day, have a
> great one, and call it a Holiday.  :)

*Bye*! (And who says I am or will be on holiday? :-) )
dominik






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