Pointing your Win95/WinNT Desktop directory to an SMB share?

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Thu, 14 Aug 1997, Arcadio A. Sincero Jr. wrote:

> Hello SAMBA Mailing List,
> 
> 	Using TweakUI from the PowerToys suite of tools, one can easily
> make thier Desktop directory point to any directory they want.

you can do this manually by editing the registry.  presumably, tweakui is 
an application that knows about these registry settings.

this method is _different_ from doing a domain logon (resulting in a
NetUserGetInfo call, the response to which contains the remote profile
location).  the registry settings point to the _local_ copy that the
client keeps of the profile. 

both the w95 and nt clients do a merge of the profiles, taking the last 
accessed of each of the files in the local and remote profiles.  if you 
point the local location at the remote location, you're going to have 
fun, and generate unnecessary network traffic as the profile is 
transferred over.

also, i'm not sure, but the client may lock the user.dat file thinking 
that it's a locally stored profile.  when you come to log off, the domain 
logon procedure copies the locally stored profile to the remote 
location.  if this file is locked....


using TweakUI to point to a remote server will result in excessive 
network traffic, as you say, as each user does a View | Refresh, or hits 
the "Start" button and accesses any sub-menus.  traffic that is normally 
directed at the local profile directory.


so, i'd only recommend that you use TweakUI if you're _not_ going to be 
doing remote user profiles.

luke