Wisdom BuildingBlock: Mandatory Profile Path

Here is another Wisdom BuildingBlock for your consideration. This one will help you correctly set an environment variable across all your different computers in your organization, which will point to the local path of a mandatory profile, which should be used for the given operating system.

This may at first sound like utter nonsense, but think of it like this: Let’s say that you want to enable users to have the same profile across different systems, say Vista, XP and Terminal Services 2003. Impossible you say? Nope, this can be done.  There is a nifty whitepaper from RES, available here which describes the entire procedure:  

To sum up the whitepaper, you can:

• Create a mandatory profile for each of the operating systems which require it
• Upload these profiles to PowerFuse Custom Resources, which will automagically replicate them out locally to the %programfiles%\res powerfuse\data\dbcache \resources\customresources folder on all machines running PowerFuse. Make a structure in PowerFuse Custom Ressources as seen here on the right (note you do not have to create all the folders etc. just point to the root folder of an existing mandatory profile and the RES console will import it with all subdirectories)
• Run the module on all target machines where users will be logging in.
• Configure User Preferences to grab the stuff which you want to store for the users uppon logout.
• Modify the User records in AD, change the user profile path of the users to the variable, say %manprofile% (remember, this can be done in Wisdom too! – perhaps a subject for another buildingblock)

This result is quite spectacular:  All users share one singular profile path (which is dynamic).  The user session will be loading the right mandator profile, as it will be specified by the variable. The path will be local, resulting in zero network traffic as result of loading the profile locally.

The Wisdom module has been designed with module parameters, so you can customize your own paths etc, making it quite easy to use.

Click here to download the module: 

Wisdom BuildingBlock: Repair NTFRS

On Windows Server 2000 and 2003, sometimes you might get a ton of Reds in the eventlog having to do with NTFRS as a Source. This is a nifty BuildingBlock for Wisdom which will repair the NTFRS (NT File Replication Service), according to Q290762 in the MS Knowledgebase. The buildingblock will allow you to perform both a Non-Authorative restore and an Authoriative restore.

Click the rarfile here to download it: 

More Buildingblocks!

Looks like there’s now a buildingblock section at the RES forum.  It’s even a publicly accessible place – Nice!However, these are not RES endorsed nor certified buildingblocks. Guess it’s the same groundrules which applies around here. Anyway go have a look here

Best Practices BB for Wisdom

Here’s the first posting in the Wisdom Buildingblock archive. This one  contains some best practices for Servers and for Workstations. This is essentially  just a bunch of stuff which made sense at the time, but hopefully you may have some use for it.

This file contains two buildingblocks which contains some nice registry fixes picked up along the way, which can make things somewhat easier for you.  The Reghacks in these buildingblocks is just collections of relevant stuff that’s been googled over time. Slice and dice the modules as you like. The Workstation building block contains the following Reghacks

• Delete cached copies of roaming profiles. We all know what  this one does, right?
• Disable the XP tour. Eliminates that pesky bubble which will bother new users the first 3 times they logon
• Remove VMware HGFS.dat (shared folder support) This thing has a nasty habbit of locking up profiles. Note: The HGFS reghack is disabled per default as you probably will need to change the Network Provider order so it matches your target environment
• Remove USB device checking. This removes the This Device Can Perform Faster message. This is a legacy setting back from VMware 5x as it didn’t support USB 2.0. You may however still find use for it
• Kill the indexing service on Vista. If you know where your s*** is, all this thing is gonna do is slow you down.
• Clean up StubPaths. This will remove the first-time config of IE, Outlook Express etc at first login. You’re probably going to use PowerFuse for this anyway, right?
• Reduce animation on .default profile. This can reduce the zoom effect when the PowerFuse loader screen pops up (not tested completely) but give it a whirl

The Server Best Practices module contains:

• Disable the Shutdown Event Tracker. Yeah yeah, lot’s of good reasons to keep it, but if you hate to answer why you want to reboot your server, this is for you.
• Disable print spooler logging stuff to the eventlog
• Disable the Manage Your Server thing from popping up the first time you log in
• Delete the HKLM shadow keys (see the module for more info)
• Clean out specific citrix stuff from the HKLM Run key, such as Java update and the Icabar.
• Clean up the stub paths, same as the workstation module.

On a side note, RESguru.com now has two new co-authors!

/TRG