Date: 10/23/07 (IT Professionals)    Keywords: linux

I just picked up a client where the recently departed Sys Admin had implemented roaming profiles. Point-to-point VPN's connect multiple sites over biz-class cable back to the main site where the server containing the profile is located. Needless to say, log on/off is painful...on the order of ten minutes at times. The profiles also frequently fail to either load or push changes back to the server in all locations, including machines that are on the same LAN as the server. It's just not stable and it's eating too much of my time.

I don't want to fix it. I want to kill it. Dead.

The client's concerns about dumping the roaming profiles are backup and user convenience. One set of users is very mobile and may use two desktops in addition to their laptops on any given day. When it works the roaming profile is great for keeping one consistent environment and one version of a document in a known place. When it doesn't work it eats days of documents on one bite.  Anyway...

Anyone out there have any experience of weaning users off of roaming profiles without running into data loss or "I have eight copies of that report on five machines and two flash drives and it's all your fault"? What sort of issues did you run into with data integrity and user education/resistance?

Next I have to wean them from their Gentoo Linux servers running Postfix & Oracle calendar to Exchange '07. (shudder)

TIA for any thoughts.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/itprofessionals/69238.html