[tech] Clubroom home directories of the future

[David Adam]

There were a few replies and some discussion on IRC, but I think it's time 
to actually do something about this.

People felt that having Desktop folders shared across operating systems 
was, in general, bad for usability. However, having Documents folders 
shared is probably a good idea.

My current plan is a hybrid of 2A and 2B, and works as follows:

* Move the contents of $AWAY/profiles/My Documents to $AWAY/Documents and 
  symlink the old name to the new one. This may produce some collisions
  so I will check this first.
* Set up the network default user profile to have folder redirection for 
  the Documents, (and Music, Videos, and Pictures) folders to the 
  appropriate location in %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH% (i.e. $AWAY).
* In $AWAY, create a new directory for Windows Vista/7 redirected folders 
  (probably called windows).
* Move $AWAY/profiles/Desktop to $AWAY/windows/Desktop and symlink the old 
  name to the new one.
* Create $AWAY/windows/AppData.
* Set up the default user profile for folder redirection for Desktop to 
  %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%\windows\Desktop and similar for AppData.

This results in

$AWAY/profiles    - Windows XP profile information
$AWAY/windows     - Windows Desktop (all versions) & Application Data
$AWAY/profiles.v2 - Windows 7 roaming profile data
$AWAY/Documents   - 'My Documents' on Windows XP, 7, Linux, OS X

which I hope isn't too hugely confusing and will provide a reasonable user 
experience.

If there's no objections, I'll go ahead and make these changes next week.

A useful reference, though Group Policy heavy (we are not using it), is
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766489%28WS.10%29.aspx

David Adam
UCC Wheel Member
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au

On Wed, 2 Jun 2010, David Adam wrote:
> I would like some consensus on how to deal with home directories for 
> clubroom machines, in particular those running Windows.
> 
> Some background: the UCC hosts files on /away that provide networked home 
> directories for user logins on clubroom machines. For a user's $HOME path, 
> there is a corresponding /away/$HOME (herein referred to as $AWAY). Logins 
> on Linux and Mac OS clubroom machines mount the /away filesystem over NFS 
> as /home, and thus the users' home directory is $AWAY. Within this 
> directory are the various folders for things like Desktop, Documents and 
> Downloads.
> 
> Windows XP machines, on the other hand, use roaming profiles. 
> Traditionally, these profiles have been stored in $AWAY/profiles. The 
> entire contents of this directory is synced to the clubroom machine at 
> logon, then copied back at logout. The Windows machines are also 
> configured to connect to $AWAY as drive H: for access to the files that 
> other operating systems use, etc. Because many users are unaware of the 
> mechanics of this process, many of our users dump several gigabytes of 
> data in their Windows desktop, which has to be copied back and forward 
> (slow) and takes up space on the disk due to roaming profile caching.
> 
> This is a problem across most Windows XP sites and therefore Microsoft 
> have seen fit to alter the process in Windows Vista and Windows 7. These 
> operating systems connect to a different network share (profiles.V2 
> instead of profiles) and impose tight regulations on the size of the 
> roaming profile. No settings or files are migrated across from the old 
> profile during first logon. To allow people to still store their gigabytes 
> of whatever on their desktop, administrators are strongly encouraged to 
> set up Folder Redirection, where any access to certain folders in the 
> local copy of the roaming profile is redirected to the network.
> 
> Obviously we would like to get this working at UCC. There are some 
> decisions to make:
> 
> 1. Deployment of Folder Redirection.
> 
> The easiest way to set up Folder Redirection is to use Group Policy, the 
> Windows central management tool. We are not running Active Directory and 
> there are no plans in the near future to move to it, so we need to look 
> for alternatives. The old way of getting around this was to use NT Policy, 
> but that's not supported in newer versions of Windows.
> 
> 1A: default profiles (like skeldir for Windows): nobody has a Vista/7 
> style profile yet, and if we define a default user profile with 
> appropriate folder redirection settings, every user will get the right 
> settings on first login. The advantage of this is that it's reasonably 
> clean, works across all users, and doesn't require modification of client 
> machine policies. However, we only get one chance to get it right, and 
> there is no way to edit existing profiles without doing it all manually.
> 
> 1B: logon scripts: we can define a logon script for all users to set the 
> Folder Redirection policy at each logon. This would also give us an 
> infrastructure to deploy other useful registry hacks as necessary. 
> Unfortunately, it requires us to set a local machine policy ("Run logon 
> scripts synchronously") to avoid unpredictable behaviour during logon (the 
> first time, anyway), although this could probably be deployed using our 
> standard operating environment tool, WPKG, which is already going to be 
> set up for Windows 7 to hack the registry so that domain logons work.
> 
> 2. Choice of folders.
> 
> All users currently have two desktop folders - one in $AWAY/Desktop and 
> one in $AWAY/profiles/Desktop. The same applies to Documents folders, etc. 
> etc. Where should we redirect these folders to?
> 
> 2A: seamless Windows experience: all users will see the same files in 
> Windows XP and Windows 7, as the redirection policy will be set to 
> $AWAY/profiles/Desktop. As Windows XP will probably go away soon enough, 
> this my least preferred option.
> 
> 2B: One True Desktop, except Windows XP: redirection policy will be to 
> $AWAY/Desktop, and logging in on Windows 7 will show the same files on the 
> desktop as Linux.
> 
> 2C: One True Desktop: as above, except we copy everything currently in 
> $AWAY/profiles/Desktop to $AWAY/Desktop, and symlink the former to the 
> latter. Probably the best user experience (no "where did my data go", 
> maybe some "where did all this stuff come from"), but may require dealing 
> with naming collisions (unlikely).
> 
> Also, 2B and 2C suffer from the problem [JCF] noted in 
> http://wiki.ucc.asn.au/WindowsProfiles#Caveats-1