samba - Sep 2024 - Advice on Folder Redirection for users that work remotely

Mandi! June Chong | TechnologyWise via samba
  In chel di` si favelave...
> Would someone be able to advise us on how to handle 'Folder
Redirection'
> for users that work remotely?
I'm currently using roaming profiles, with quota, and with a careful
exclusions from profiles by folder redirection and
'HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ExcludeProfileDirs'.

Clearly we get some troubles, but manageable.

Also: offline file (Client Side Cache, or CSC, in MS lingo) are enabled by
default even on Win11, and get activated automatically for all redirected
folders.

> We?ve noticed that user profiles often don?t load until users connect to 
> the VPN tunnel. How do you handle issues where user profiles fail to 
> load before the user authenticates to the domain controller? While 
> trying to minimise any input from the end-users.
For VPN users (and user wireless) profiles get not synced (because connectivity
goes up after logon), but it is intended; CSC do their work (so redirected
folders are available to users) and if correctly tweaked you can enable or
disable in VPN.

--

On Thursday, September 26th, 2024 at 07:17, Marco Gaiarin via samba <samba at
lists.samba.org> wrote:
> Mandi! June Chong | TechnologyWise via samba
> In chel di` si favelave...
> 
> > Would someone be able to advise us on how to handle 'Folder
Redirection'
> > for users that work remotely?
> 
> 
> I'm currently using roaming profiles, with quota, and with a careful
> exclusions from profiles by folder redirection and
'HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows
> NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ExcludeProfileDirs'.
> 
> Clearly we get some troubles, but manageable.
> 
> Also: offline file (Client Side Cache, or CSC, in MS lingo) are enabled by
> default even on Win11, and get activated automatically for all redirected
> folders.
> 
> > We?ve noticed that user profiles often don?t load until users connect
to
> > the VPN tunnel. How do you handle issues where user profiles fail to
> > load before the user authenticates to the domain controller? While
> > trying to minimise any input from the end-users.
> 
> 
> For VPN users (and user wireless) profiles get not synced (because
connectivity
> goes up after logon), but it is intended; CSC do their work (so redirected
> folders are available to users) and if correctly tweaked you can enable or
> disable in VPN.
> 
> --
> 
> 
> 
> --
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Hi!

I have first disabled the automatic offline cache of redirected folders ever
since windows XP, now I do it through a GPO but before samba ad was here I used
to disable it via registry in the users netlogon script.

I used to use roaming profiles for many years, disabling CSC on the profiles
share and redirecting the "My documents" or "Documents"
location via GPO to the users home share on which I explicitly make available
offline but a couple of years ago I ditched the whole roaming profiles, never
looking back at them. I do keep the redirection of the "My documents"
to the users home share as I explained earlier.

With this set up the user can log in even without a connection to the domain
with the profile and access to their documents folder and when the connection
comes up they have access to the rest of the folders.

Hope this helps.
Best regards,
Dave.