#127531 - 2004-10-07 03:20 AM
Need Advice - Speeding School's Network up
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mgpeter
Fresh Scripter
Registered: 2004-10-07
Posts: 7
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I recently got hired on as an Administrator for a small/medium High School. The high school has over 200 computers for it's students, with most running NT 4, some Win2K and are just now starting to implement WinXP.
Currently, the school has 2 NT4 Servers, and the network is utilizing Roaming Profiles. The problem is about every hour all 200+ computers are being logged out, then in with different students. This slows the network down to a crawl. It can take the Workstations upto 10 minutes to log the students in, and some workstations time out and just create a local profile.
Any suggestions on getting away from roaming profiles, without having to maintain local profiles for all the student's on each machine.
I was considering just allowing the machines to create local profiles whenever a student logs in, then have the login script always delete the previous student's profiles. I don't know if this is the way to do it or not.
Anyone have to deal with a similar situation ?
Thanks for any info.
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#127532 - 2004-10-07 04:05 AM
Re: Need Advice - Speeding School's Network up
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Shawn
Administrator
Registered: 1999-08-13
Posts: 8611
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Quote:
Any suggestions on getting away from roaming profiles, without having to maintain local profiles for all the student's on each machine.
Well, to the best of my knowledge, whether you use local or roaming profiles, a locally (cached) version of the profile will exist. If you have 100 roaming users log into a single machine, that machine will have 100 locally cached roaming profiles (taking-up space).
So I guess, why not just get rid of your roaming profiles altogether. You wont be using any less space on the wkstn, and youll be saving a boatload of server space, and your login times will improve.
I mean, what the heck do students need roaming profiles for anyways ?
(btw), our organization has roaming users ... about 10,000 of them, they do present unique challenges.
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#127533 - 2004-10-07 04:58 AM
Re: Need Advice - Speeding School's Network up
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mgpeter
Fresh Scripter
Registered: 2004-10-07
Posts: 7
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I guess They implemented roaming profiles a few years ago because some of the workstation computers did not have adequate disk space to handle hundreds of user profiles.
The machines are also setup to remove any "cached profiles" using the registry, (...\WINLOGON\DeleteRoamingCache:REG_DWORD:1). There are still some workstations that probably won't have free space to last a week if we switched back to local profiles (7-8 classes a day, and rarely will the same student use the same computer during a class).
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#127534 - 2004-10-07 05:33 PM
Re: Need Advice - Speeding School's Network up
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Bryce
KiX Supporter
Registered: 2000-02-29
Posts: 3167
Loc: Houston TX
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well..... you could do
- get off of roaming profiles.
- write a admin script that runs under admin rights, schedule the admin script to run X number of minutes, or once a day, or on a time schedule that fits your needs.
The admin script will delete unwanted profiles.
Make the admin script know what profiles need to stay, and also make the admin script aware of current loged on users so as to not delete a profile taht is in use.
Bryce
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#127535 - 2004-10-08 05:21 AM
Re: Need Advice - Speeding School's Network up
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mgpeter
Fresh Scripter
Registered: 2004-10-07
Posts: 7
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Thanks for the advice, I already have an Admin Script running on all of the computers at various times doing things such as copying rescue data to a central location, etc. So I think I will just add the functionality to it. It might also be easier than I thought because all of the students have a username beginning with their graduation year (i.e. 05user), so it will be easy to avoid deleting important profiles or staff's profiles.
Thanks again.
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#127537 - 2004-10-08 08:09 AM
Re: Need Advice - Speeding School's Network up
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ShaneEP
MM club member
Registered: 2002-11-29
Posts: 2127
Loc: Tulsa, OK
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Quote:
Also, make sure you're using switches and not old dumb hubs for your connections.
And if youre using Cisco switches, weve found that machines run much faster with their NICs set to 100/full vs say Auto.
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#127539 - 2004-10-08 02:01 PM
Re: Need Advice - Speeding School's Network up
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Kdyer
KiX Supporter
Registered: 2001-01-03
Posts: 6241
Loc: Tigard, OR
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I have to agree with the getting rid of Roaming Profiles. Once we did that, quite a few of our headaches went away.
Kent
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