Disabling Profile Caching on NT4.x

[Wolfgang Ratzka]

Daniel Fonseca wrote:
> 
> The problem is that, still, NT downloads the profile and except for it
> being mandatory, it has no regard for disk quotas in the linux box (every
> writing in the desktop is actually to the "C drive", for example) and only
> when the profile should be updated the quotas have effect (efective
> writing in the "H drive" or whatever), possibly failing due to quota
> exceeding, and (haven't tried it) upon failing of the update of the
> roaming profile, since NT does not cache it, maybe some data loss happens
> here (files in the Desktop, etc.) ?

Yes, of course, you loose, one alway looses ;-).

> My problem is that I'd like to give users non-mandatory profiles but have
> them use always their home drive (H: in this case), instead of them
> writing on the C drive as is the case of their profile (desktop, etc.).

Well there are some things that have their place in the profile (relatively
small configuration files). Of course, sooner or later some user will be tempted
to put a 10MByte The_Only_Copy_Of_My_PHD_Thesis.DOC onto the desktop, because
it's such a nice and prominent place. Logged off once, logged back on again,
and whoppe!

The other problem is that a plain vanilla installation of MS Office 97 will 
by default place new documents into the "Personal Files" folder of the user's 
profile. (This might not be the exact name - I'm translating back from 
MS-Deutsch "Eigene Dateien").

> I do this in Win 95 by policies specifying their desktop to be h:\desktop
> and so forth for the Start Menu, etc.

> Can anyone do such a thing in Win NT?

Yes ist is definitely possible.
(see HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Explorer\UserShellFolders)
I've successfully tried to redirect at least the "Desktop" folder and
the "Personal" folder, which should be redirected to the user's homedirectory 
("%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH" on NT).
-- 
Wolfgang Ratzka (per Modem von zu Hause)
Where do you want to go tomorrow?