Networking hints and tips

[james73]

I've been in my job for about 6 months now, and considering the
state of our small office LAN when I started, I've performed miracles

One thing I haven't managed to get my head around yet is
logon scripts (mapping drives, home folders, setting the desktop etc).
It's not a big problem right now, cos when the boss is buying in
some more PC's he's buying old second hand boxes running
Win98SE, but I do want to learn how to do it for future
referrence. Our server is Windows Server 2003, and we have
about 20 PC's - 6 of them are WinXP Pro, the rest are Win98SE.

Can anyone point me to a good online source of how to go about
these sorts of things, or recommend a decent book?


Cheers in advance.



James H

[vass0922]

I'm assuming you want to use VBScript for the logon scripts.

Mapped drives you'll use
WScript.Network
http://www.winguides.com/scripting/reference.php?id=108

Home Drives should be in the profile so don't think you have to worry about that

Desktop, not sure... depends on what you want to do?
Roaming profiles are set in GP I believe.

by the way, next time if I Don't respond within a day or so PM me.. I sometimes miss the responses.

I do a LOT of VBScripting for my network at work so I'm familiar with a lot of what you'll need to do.

DVNT1 went through the same path you are not long ago so he will be another resource here

[james73]

Yes, Im interested in stuff like Group Policies - again it's not
something I know anything about. I've been told that Win Server
2003 can use GP pretty easily.



James H

[vass0922]

To my knowledge I don't think GP is heavily scripted as its pretty much set across the board for large groups already.
The only part I could see being scripted is changing settings for multiple sites.

If you can be more specific what you want to do maybe we can help.

[james73]

What I want to do is have everyone's desktop the same (and deny
them the right to change it); in WinXP I want them to have the
'Classic Windows' theme; map the network drives we have (not
bothered about printers); one of the shared drives has a folder
with each user's name - I want that to be their 'home' folder, and
I'd also like it to deny access to any other person's home folder.

Not much

We only have a small network of about 20 PC's. Most are Win98SE,
but I'm sure the boss will want to upgrade them at some point in the
near future.



James H

[vass0922]

1. Home folders - Done in NT User profile
2. Desktop - Done in Global Policies.
3. Home Folder Permissions - Modify NTFS permissions on home folders. Only 20 users won't take more than 5 - 10 minutes setting manually anyways.
4. Mapping drives - See WScript.Network as I posted above

[james73]

I'm still totally confused




James H

[james73]

Got a simple little 'map network drives' script to work

Slight problem - when I log off my Test user account, it says
something like 'cannot locate your roaming profile' - need to
know how to create a profile for every one.

I only get this message on the Win XP PC's, not on the Win98SE PC's



James H

[DVNT1]

My 2 cents on profiles, don't use use Roaming Profiles. They can have a lot of problems, at least without a lot of eduction on the users' part.

I map a user home directory to h: and redirect the main itmes their via GPOs. Like My Documents and related sub-folders.

[james73]

Originally posted by DVNT1
My 2 cents on profiles, don't use use Roaming Profiles. They can have a lot of problems, at least without a lot of eduction on the users' part.

I map a user home directory to h: and redirect the main itmes their via GPOs. Like My Documents and related sub-folders.

That sounds neat. Could you give me an example? Say I want to
make each users folder (on our Y:\) their home folder for My
Documents etc. Do I create the profile and save it in that
particular users folder?

E.g. user jsmith would be y:\jsmith\my documents etc?




Cheers


James H