Real World Computing
Big noisy beast
Nevertheless, I'm still convinced this software should be on every network in the SME computing space. It gives you all you need in terms of server management, centralised patch updating and distribution, and plenty more useful facilities. Worth every penny, it moves your IT team onward from playing chase-the-problem-support-calls toward becoming an effective group that can predict and fix faults before small problems grow into big outages.
Jon Honeyball
Mixed-mode musings
Running a mixed-mode network can be a frustrating experience when you're constantly trying to balance the actions of old and new operating systems, hoping to get them to gel somehow into a coherent network scenario. Whereas most difficulties used to centre around the operating systems running on the domain controllers and other network servers, now a whole heap of the fun has descended onto the desktop thanks to the arrival of Windows Vista. Don't be alarmed: this isn't going to be another rant about which operating system is best, but rather a look at how the profound changes Vista brings with it will affect a system administrator's life. One of the areas of an admin's activity that's been most affected by Vista is that concerned with roaming profiles. So if you want to avoid the pain experienced by the people who've been sending me emails asking for help on this topic in recent months, it will be worth your while reading on to see what the biggest changes involve.
The roaming profile setup for a domain enables the network's users to log on at any workstation in the network and find they have access to all their own files there. It's a wonderful feature that users really appreciate, although it has side effects that can make system admins wince if they're not careful as to how the profiles are set up. The problem with roaming profiles is that in order to provide a user with access to their own files whenever and wherever they log on, that user's profile must be dragged from the server onto the local PC at which they logged on, and it will remain there for ever more, taking up valuable hard disk space unless you have some system in place to dispose of it. The advantage of roaming profiles is exactly the same as the problem; namely, that once this user's profile has been dragged from the server onto the local computer where they logged on, it will remain there ready for that user to access instantly should the server go down. So long as a user can access the same machine they logged onto, say, yesterday, then if the server goes down they'll still have access to their latest files and can work despite a lack of network access.
Given this contradiction, what you'd really like your users to do is just "roam" to the same machine all the time, since that way it will always be up-to-date in case there's a network outage, and their login times will be really fast because only a few changed or new files will be sent from the server when they next log in. However, the reality in my experience is that my users tend to hot-desk by taking full advantage of the roaming capability to log on from wherever is most convenient, or is free at the precise time they need access. That's certainly what roaming profiles are for, but it does create a hard disk space problem, especially if these users have large profiles. It also leads to slow logins, as everything has to be fetched across the network to a different PC each time.
Nevertheless, such problems aside, roaming profiles were and remain a joy, and I use them all the time. I also use the Home Folder feature, which gives me a nice central location from which to back up all my users' data files. Windows XP was the desktop/laptop operating system of choice, and all was well in my world until Windows Vista came along and it was time for a rethink. The biggest problem Windows Vista brings with it, from an administrator's point of view, is that it generates profile folders that are completely separate from the ones generated by Windows XP. User A has been logging on and off various workstations for some time using is Windows XP roaming profile, and everyone is as happy as Larry. Then user A buys himself a Windows Vista laptop because he likes to play with new things: he sets it up on the network and logs on for the first time, goes "ooh" and "ahh" for a while and fiddles with all the new widgets, then he goes "ugh" and "aaagh" and "where the **** have all my files gone!" and starts chasing the sysadmin. And if said admin doesn't know what Vista's done, they're going to be stuck for an immediate answer.
