Re: Roaming profiles

Yes! Please post any links to profile solutions you may find. I'm very 
interested & so would the folks running www.ZillaVilla.com and many others who 
need to access email, bookmarks and stuff from more than one machine on home or 
office networks and mobile devices. Haven't used Novell since 3.1 or so, What is 
Zen? oh STW...

http://www.novell.com/products/zenworks/
http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/zenworks/

This appears to be an interesting package for win32 desktop management, but what 
if MS decided to change the chessboard again? ..it seems to be yet another 
proprietary solution, and doesn't address heterogenous environments or open 
standards. I'll still look into it more, cause it may solve some MS headaches.

I'm primarily interested in keeping important things like email and on a central 
network share that can be accessed via linux or win32 clients. Even at home, it 
would be nice if my family could access their mozilla email/profile from any of 
the 5 pcs we've managed to accumulate on a small network using a linux samba PDC 
sharing our home dirs or even a network drive like the "snap" line. In the 
enterprise this type of functionality will be required, for mobility, security, 
backup, and administration. IMO moz is very mature & stable now... bug or 
feature, *profile management is the most critical thing missing for wide 
deployment*.

Moz also has the potential to be OS independent & could lead the way in the 
profile management/storage department. I never liked putting crap in "My 
Documents" anyway, much less C:\Documents and Settings\[Windows Login 
Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Profiles\[Profile Name]\[random string].slt\
That's just insane!... like most things M$ does & impossible to manage.

The linux path is much simpler & could be shared easily, except for that nasty 
"random string"... ~/.mozilla/[Profile Name]/[random string].slt/

Seems to me, the issue with profile corruption in multiple sessions could be 
avoided, by automatically locking or loggin off an existing session, while 
beginning a second one from another location... While it may be a bit 
inconvenient at times, it may help forgetful users to practice "logging off" 
anyway, -normally a good thing.

Issues with Sharing Profiles
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/shared_profiles.html

Mozilla Profile Sharing Tech Documents Home Page
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/profileSharing/

Mozilla 1.0 FAQ -- User profiles
http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/profile.html
http://www.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla1.0/#profiles

I currently share Netscape 4.79 profiles on a network for users in their home 
dirs. Occaisionally, their profile gets confused or slightly corrupted, I simply 
delete the listing from the affected client without deleting the network 
files/folders and create a fresh one pointing to the network share again. NS 
Profile manager recognizes existing data and happily creates the new profile 
using same settings. I have opened multiple sessions using this technique and 
have rarely lost data, usually a minor bookmark syncing issue.

-Hope this info helps any developers listening, again Mozilla is a fantastic 
product. Keep up the good work, and please consider spending some time on the 
profile management issues.

-- PGPID=0x710B8A1F
Art Wildman - [email protected]
National Weather Service, JAX FL.
http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jax/
-My opinions are my own & may not represent those of my employer.

Anders Gustafsson wrote:
> In article <[email protected]>, Art Wildman wrote:
> 
>>As one of 10,000 fed govt users locked into Netscape/Messenger 4.79, I can say 
>>this is very important to us... if we are to every consider upgrading to Moz 
>>over Outlook. Perhaps that will get some corporate folks interested? I can't 
>>recommend it to management, until there is progess in these areas for the 
>>sysadmins & enterprise...
> 
> 
> There will be an article in the Novell AppNotes about doing it with ZEN shortly. 
> It works like a dream and you can even use the same profile for 9x and NT/2000 ;)
> 
> Interested?
>