Roaming Profile Save Path Change

[ShagDevil]

Hello all,
Ok, I recently added a *Nix based NAS to our network. Now, the users all have roaming profiles on the old server that was handling logons/logoffs. Well, I'm attempting to move all these profiles over to the new NAS and I thought I'd start with my own account. So, I moved my profile folder over to the file server, etc etc. Everything went smooth until it came time to logoff my account.

After receiving errors messages when logging off, it dawned on me that my system was still trying to save my profile on the old server. Well, I searched high and low and I couldn't find any solutions (just a lot of mumbo-jumbo about creating new roaming profiles and saving those). Now, the user profiles we have are bloated with personal files so, starting over was out of the question. Sure, I could copy the files blah blah blah. Nonsense! I was looking for an easy way out.

So, I knew that somewhere on my local machine, there had to be some kind of registry entry that told my system where to save the roaming profile. Well, there is.
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList
Within that key lies a registry value titled CentralProfile. I changed the old path to the new path and so far, it's worked perfectly. I'm still testing it out, so we'll see how it goes.

***note - This is in regards to machines (like this *Nix based NAS) that are not necessarily Windows servers

[Ignatius]

That's a great tip. Filed in my "useful snippets" book now!

[alakhiyar]

Good job ShagDevil! I usually have a "do over day" when moving, profiles from one Server to another. I call it "Bringing out the Dead". Nothing like a clean install with fresh profiles. Takes some time, but I like the end result.

[r3b00+]

Would changing the profile path in ad to \\newservername\profiles\%username% for all users not also do the job?

[ShagDevil]

Would changing the profile path in ad to \\newservername\profiles\%username% for all users not also do the job?

Well, if you're moving the profile, you'd have no choice but to change the User Profile location in AD. But, that only worked for the log-on process (for me). See, I thought the same thing until I kept getting errors when I logged off. The problem is that under normal circumstances, this registry value is changed but if you're not using a Windows Server (I'm using a *Nix based NAS), then this value won't update correctly.
If there is an easier way, I'm all ears

[alakhiyar]

If you're on a Windows 2003 domain, you can just select all the user accounts in Active Directory in their respective OU, right-click and go to properties and do a mass update of the profile storage location assuming they're all uniform. Something like: \\servername\Users\%USERNAME% usually does the trick.

You can use the %LOGONSERVER% variable in place of \\servername. That way the profiles are not tied to one server.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/141714