autoconfigure new NT4 sp3 clients, samba 1.9.19 server

[Matthew Chapman]

> 1.  The profile created is about .5 Mb in size.  The parts that we want
>     in there are maybe 20% of that.  How does NT decide which of this stuff
>     gets copied into each user's profile, and from where?

A profile is a big heap of junk which is moved around as a whole. Thus
you want to keep that folder as small as possible.

(So you don't want users saving documents under their profile. Word
etc by default save to the 'personal' folder there, so I would
recommend changing that to point to the user's home directory
instead).

If a new user logs in and NT cannot find either a roaming profile or
locally cached copy, it copies c:\winnt\profiles\Default User into the
user's profile instead.

> Ie, can we set
>     up a default template on the Samba server which will be used instead?

As I see it you have three options:

(1) Have a mandatory profile (that is, each user is served a common
profile which is not saved back). This is what we have done.

(2) Have a preexec script which copies your desired 'default profile'
into the user's profile directory when a new user logs in (i.e. if
there is no profile there already).

(3) Put your 'default profile' into c:\winnt\profiles\Default User on
each of your machines (via a script which connects to each ADMIN$
share, not walking around with a floppy!!).

> 2.  In typical Microsoft shoveware style, each new user gets to suffer
>     through the following features:
>
>        A.  A tour of IE 4
>        B.  The welcome to WNT series of messages
>
>     How do we shut these off?  (Preferably in the template profile
>     discussed above.)

Log into your template profile, select all of the 'Don't show me this
again' checkboxes, log out so it is saved back.

> 3.  Navigator 4 has two options for the user specific stuff - default, or
>     a named user.  But we don't see any indications that in can take
>     an environmental variable for the path used for the named user. Ie,
>     When our users log into the NT workstations they always see a disk:
>
>       Z:\username
>
>     which is mounted from the Samba server.  We want to be able to tell
>     Navigator that the profile is in there, but we don't see how. Ie,
>     we'd like to use something like:
>
>       Z:\$USER\path\path
>
>     so that $USER gets substituted with the real username.  In other words,
>     we'd like to let users have their own Navigator profiles, but don't
>     want to have to manually create hundreds of specific accounts. The
>     navigator documentation doesn't indicate that this is possible (or that
>     it isn't, either.)

Why not just point Z: at the user's home directory rather than
z:\username? This is far simpler for everyone.

This is what I have done to get Netscape Communicator 4.05 working for
everyone:

- Created a single Netscape user 'default' which points to z:\nscomm.
- Created a batch file which creates z:\nscomm and z:\nscomm\mail if
they don't exist before starting Netscape.
- Used Netscape Mission Control to change default settings for new
users (e.g. lock the Organisation field).

    Matt

--
Matt Chapman, New College
m.chapman at student.unsw.edu.au