Hybrid Terminal Server Home Drives??

K

Kyle

We are a very large organization in which Citrix is growing very
quickly. Here is a situation we are currently facing:

Users in United States, Europe, and Asia. Citrix servers also located
in same areas. In one situation (and more to follow for sure), we
have an application deployed on Citrix servers in the US. When
European users connect to these servers, their home drive is mapped
back to a file server in Europe (we are not wanting to put servers in
Europe in this case). This takes a long time to map the home drive
and the user experience is therefore not good. However, if we were to
set the Terminal Server Home drive to a file server in the US, then
whenever they log into a Citrix server in Europe, that would take a
long time. Therefore, we are looking for some type of custom solution
in which the home drive is dependent upon which server they log into.
For example, Application A is published on US Citrix servers,
therefore we want their home drive to be in the US also. Application
B is published on European Citrix servers, therefore we want their
home drive to be on a Europe file server, etc... Our US and Europe
domains are both W2K, with a full trust, but they are separate
domains.

Microsoft claims there is no way to do what we want. We have used
Hybrid Profiles in which we use a variable in the TS Profile Path and
then set an environment variable on each server. It works great for
us. Any similar hope with home drives? The variable situation does
not work with home drives. Any sort of login script always occurs
after the home drive mapping, so the time delay has already occurred.
Is there any reg hack that will prevent the home drive from mapping at
all? We would be fine with that in this situation as home drives are
not needed for this application. Although, we can not simply remove
the home drive from these users as they access other systems in which
they may need their home drive.

I know there are some potential solutions with enterprise DFS, but if
possible we are trying to avoid any major implementation like that.
Although I am willing to listen to anything.

I appreciate any help you could provide.

-Kyle
 
M

Matthew Harris [MVP]

Not quite sure if this would help, but could you remove
the terminal services home drive from the user's account
(through active directory users and groups) and just leave
that section blank? Could you also manipulate the %
rootdrive% and %homedrive% and %homepath% and/or %
homeshare% variables in a logon script to 'trick' the
terminal server into thinking that you had speicifc a
terminal services home drive path?

-M
 
K

Kyle

Leaving the TS Home blank defaults back to using the regular home
drive, which is non negotiable. Everyone in our company has to have a
regular homedrive. As far a using a script to trick the %rootdrive%
or %homedrive%, you can not reset the home variables, they seem to be
persistent. Also, any type of login script would execute after the
home drive maps, which is what is causing us this delay.

Kyle
 

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