[nzlug] Recommendation for office laptop setup

[David Young]

Hi Toby,

Since you mention Samba, I'm assuming that the clients are running Windows?

In my experience, the best solution for laptop users has been to give them a
local profile, stick everything they need on a mapped drive, and then make
that drive available offline. Windows then handles the syncing on login /
logoff, and the user can still access all the data he needs from home, on
the network drive which "appears" to be there.

It's maybe not the most elegant or sleek solution, but it seems stable, and
keeps the users happy, while making sure that I have their critical data
backed up :)

-- 
Regards,
David Young


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On 7/2/07, Toby Collett <tcollett+lists at plan9.net.nz> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
> I am looking after the IT requirements of a small tech company (<10 staff,
> but probably doubling in the next 12 months). It is a new company so all
> the
> IT systems are being setup fresh, which has both advantages and
> disadvantages...
>
> My question is on how to set up network home drivers, I currently have
> samba
> shares set up which work fine for desktops, but we are also going to have
> several laptops on the network and the challenge comes when these need to
> go
> offsite...(and therefore off the network). There are obviously some easy
> setup options such as just having local accounts on the laptops and don't
> have them participate equally on the network, but I was hoping to do a
> little better than that.
>
> So really this has two parts:
> 1) What sort of schemes for 'roaming profiles' (for lack of a better term)
> do people use or recommend out there, and
> 2) What technologies to implement the scheme
>
> A few of the options I'm tossing around to just to get things started:
> - split the profile part of the home drive and the data parts, have the
> profile rsync'd/unison'd at login/logout and mount the data part. This
> means
> that the users will still be able to login when offsite (assuming we cache
> authentication...) but will only have access to the data portion in the
> office, so they would need to explicitly copy/sync the data they want
> before
> leaving and returning.
> - sync the whole home drives on log in/out, but these are potentially big
> home drives (> 1GB, there are software developers with all the svn
> checkouts
> etc...)
> - Filesystems that automatically support connections that come and go
> (such
> as coda), this is interesting to me, but Im worried it could be a little
> much to implement, any one had experience with it and wish to comment?
>
> A few more comments, most users will have 'their pc' that they will use on
> a
> daily basis, but the laptops are likely to be shared. Despite users having
> their PC it would be nice to have support for just moving them to another
> computer for replacements/upgrades/etc. We currently have this with the
> samba solution.
>
> Enough from me, looking forward to everyones thoughts,
>
> Toby Collett
>
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