New T42 - how do I set this up in our domain?

[mattfromomaha]

Ok, I work at a physician's office that until now has always used (IBM ThinkCentre) desktops. With the opening of a second office, our office manager wanted a laptop. I got her a T42 2379-R1U.

We have a Win 2003 domain here at the office, and she has a roaming profile. She plans to use the laptop between the two offices and at home and on the road.

Now, I need to ask for help as to how to set this T42 up. If I join it to the domain and log in as her, it will pull down her profile and everything should work just like on her desktop (assuming all the correct programs are installed and such). But, what if she's working in a mobile location - when she logs on won't it complain about not finding the roaming profile on the server, and then about not connecting to network drives, etc? Is there a way around this, meaning can Windows "know" when she's in the office to synchronize with the roaming profile but when she's not in the office to use the cached copy but don't throw up the error message about it?

Then, once she's logged in to the vpn, will it try to synchronize her profile? It shouldn't, right, unless she's still connected to the vpn when she logs off her computer?

The other concern of course is with backing up her files. The roaming profile is great because it keeps a copy of everything on the server (I have everyone log off nightly so synchronize profiles). But, if I take her off of the roaming profile to make the latop happier on the road would I need to set up her documents folders to synchronize?

So, join domain or not? Roaming profile or not? Help!

This is all new stuff to me, so I really appreciate any advice. I have a lot of experience with desktops on a domain, and with laptops not on a domain, but this is a new ballpark for me!

Thanks!

[GomJabbar]

I believe you can do this with IBM Access Connections. Go to Start > All Programs > Access IBM > IBM Access Connections. Launch the program and open Help from the top menu bar. You can read about setting up profiles and VPN's there.

I haven't worked with VPN's or roaming profiles, so maybe I'm off base. But take a look and see what you think.

[mattfromomaha]

I don't think we're on the same page. I'm asking about the Windows user profile, which holds things like program settings, documents, etc.

I plan to use Access Connections, though, to set up profiles for each office and for mobile locations to handle changing printers, launching the VPN, etc.

[rjm1135]

Have you tried to logon to the domain when disconnected? Do you definitely get the error messages/warnings?

Here are a couple of links - don't know if they help with roaming profiles.

http://www.jsifaq.com/subb/tip0500/rh0552.htm

http://www.jsifaq.com/SUBE/TIP2200/rh2240.htm

Cheers,
Rob.

[JaneL]

Won't it use the cached profile if it can't find the server one?

[mattfromomaha]

Rob,

Thanks for the links. I'll have to read up on them and try that out.

I tried adding the computer to the domain, logging in with the roaming profile, restarting, unhooking the ethernet cable and then trying to log into the domain via the roaming profile. I got an error that Windows cannot find the server copy of the roaming profile, so it won't be updated, but will use the cached copy for now. Everything then seemed to work fine within Windows. So, I guess this would work fine, but it would be great if there were a way to disable that error message from popping up all of the time. It would get annoying, I think.

I guess one possible solution would be to at this point remote the roaming profile path on the user's profile, so that the profile no longer tries to synchronize with the server. Then I could just setup a backup program to backup everything in the user's folder under c:\documents and settings. I'm thinking this would probably provide an adquate backup in case of a system theft/loss/crash. But, I think the ideal thing would to be to somehow silence that error message and keep a roaming profile.