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Managing Profiles in a Mixed Novell - NT Environment

Keywords:   managing NT Profiles

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Question:

Our company has Win2000 PC's logging into Novell servers. We would like to turn-on Novell's Workstation Manager to sync usernames and passwords but our problem is:

The users typically login to Novell as one username and then the workstation as another username.

I have written 2 separate Winbatch programs that will create a text file with Profile directory info; if the user logins with 2 different accounts. The program will also place a second program in the Run registry key that will copy the profile directory into the Novell username profile directory when the users logs in with the same name (When we turn on Workstation Manager).

This works pretty well but does not work as well as the manual process of going into Control Panel/System and copying one profile into the other using the Windows GUI.

What is the difference? Is there a way to automate ? We do not want to touch hundreds of PC's and we also do not want to loose users Icons and other settings.

Please help. Any assistance would be appreciated.

Answer:

Managing profiles in a mixed NetWare and NT/2K/XP environment can be tricky some times. I would recommend that you go to:

http://support.novell.com

and that you search Novell's KB for TIDs related to managing profiles.

A couple of things to keep in mind here...

1. The workstation manager service runs locally on the workstation but it gets some of its configuration data from NDS. In particular, if you've properly registered the workstation with NDS it will have a workstation object associated with it in NDS and you can apply a workstation policy in NDS that will control how the workstation manager operates.

   In particular, you can cause the workstation manager to dynamically create either permanent or volatile user accounts on the workstation, or, you can cause it to logon locally with a fixed username regardless of which NDS user account was used to login to NDS.

2. Another thing to consider is whether you've got the Novell Client and NT/2K/XP configured to pull roaming profiles from a NetWare server or if it is configured to use local profiles.

3. Profiles consist of a mixture of things. First, a profile consists of a set of personal files in a folder hierarchy that is named after the user account used to logon locally on the workstation. In the user account properties [in NT/2K/XP], you can configure where the user's profile is located and accessed from at logon time. Second, the user profile contains a copy of the user's own personal portion of the registry. This is NTUSER.DAT [the registry hive] and NTUSER.DAT.LOG [a journal file]. Be very careful about having roaming profiles if a user moves frequently between different workstations that are running different versions of Windows. The reason for the word of caution is that the internal structure of the registry hive can change between different versions of Windows and using NT to access a roaming profile for 2K or XP [or vice-versa] could result in a corrupted registry hive file. A registry hive file has an owner and it also has internal NT style permissions applied to it. When you copy a profile [as an administrator], not only does the ownership of the hive file get modified, but permissions are modified inside the hive to grant the new owner full rights to it. You can use the NT extender and the RegLoadHive() function to manually load a copy of a NTUSER.DAT file for the purpose of granting full permissions to a new owner of a copy of the hive.

So, in your case maybe you need to have the workstation manager create local accounts that have their profile configurations set up to cause the profile to be loaded from a UNC path or network drive letter such that the profile is located under the user's NDS user account's home drive/directory on a NetWare server. Then, if you detect the need to propagate a profile, you can use some FileCopy(), RegLoadHive() and some wntAccessAdd() function calls to copy the appropriate registry hive file and fix up the security on it.

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Article ID:   W15210

File Created: 2002:09:05:13:50:36

Last Updated: 2002:09:05:13:50:36