ryanschwartz.net » Windows

Quickly moving a user’s windows profile to new hardware

Ryan — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 20:54:29 +0000

Ever have someone get new hardware, run your setup, then spend an inordinate amount of time copying their windows profile to the new machine, piece by piece? Here’s how to do it quickly and cleanly, with a minimum amount of effort (the goal of every sysadmin…)

Connect both computers to the network
Log in as the user on the new computer.
Log out
Log in as an administrator on the OLD computer
Mount the administrative C$ share of the new computer as a new network drive
Open the System control panel
Click the Advanced tab, and click the Settings button in the “User Profiles” section
Highlight the user’s profile, click the “Copy To” button
Browse to the user’s profile on the new computer’s mapped drive
Set the “Permitted to use” section to the user’s domain account
Click OK, and wait for the profile to copy (no user feedback, can take a long time if their profile is big…)
You’re done.

Every user preference, down to screen saver, desktop, and favorites is on the new hardware with very little effort. Cheers!

AD and Mac OS X – one big happy family

Ryan — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 17:32:12 +0000

So I’m rebuilding my test lab in preparation for our rollout of Mac OS X 10.3.4 and the synchronized moving of authentication from 2 sources (Active Directory and Open Directory) to one (Active Directory). I thought my fellow co-workers would like some notes (as well as you, gentle reader) on how to accomplish the following:

1. All computers under your control authenticate against Active Directory.
2. All users’ home directories are stored on a Mac OS X file server running AFP and SMB.
3. All “special folders” on the PC side (Desktop, My Documents, Application Data) are redirected to the user’s home directory.
4. All Macintosh home directories are mounted via AFP as the user’s “home” folder.

What this hopes to provide is a steamlined user experience with access to their documents and settings on any computer they log on to, be that a Macintosh (which we prefer in these parts) or a PC (there’s no accounting for taste…).

Some assumtions about your current setup:

You already have and know how to admimister your Active Directory
You already have and know how to administer a Mac OS X server
You are (somewhat) comfortable in the Mac OS X CLI (Terminal.app, or your preferred application)

So here’s a step by step on how to accomplish this:

Set your server up to be an Open Directory Master: using Server Admin, select Open Directory, click settings, change role to “Open Directory Master” and enter your admin username and password, Kerberos Realm Name should be the fqdn of your server, Search base should be your.domain.tld expressed as dc=your,dc=domain,dc=tld (no spaces!)
After entering the above values, click save and your server will chug for a few moments and set up a kerberos domain, as well as update a bunch of LDAP configuration entries
Go here and follow Clint’s great writeup. (I’ll grab those pages and archive them in case they go away…)

Lockergnome and ass… (well, not anymore…)

Ryan — Wed, 26 May 2004 20:47:44 +0000

Well instead of sending a little note saying, “hey, do you by chance have an ad-blocker running?” and pointing out my mistake, Chris Pirillo made a (surprise!) sarcastic remark…

I don’t even remember the last time I visited a site that looked like ass because I blocked the ads on their page. Oh Well.

For those of you who use Safari, Firefox, Mozilla, or any other browser you can use a custom stylesheet with, check out userContent.css if you want to take control of your browsing experience.

UPDATE: Chris Pirillo loves me! No — really. Oh, and he’s graciously corrected the ‘error’ on the lockergnome family of sites. Thanks, Chris!