Kind of roaming profiles
Arno Gramatke
we are using Netscape 4.78 German and we think of switching to Mozilla
once we figured out one problem:
we store the users profiles in a folder in their home directories, e.g
x:\netscape, and tell netscape to look for the default profile in
x:\netscape. x: is a network drive that gets mapped everytime a user
logs on to the nt4 workstation. It looks like Netscape stores this
parameter in a central location, so that this parameter can be accessed
by every user.
since we got 150+ users, we would like to create a new directory in
every users home drive, e.g. x:\netscape6, and copy a default-profile to
that directory. And that's were the problem is: how can we tell mozilla
to look always in that directory for the profile like we used to do with
Netscape 4.78? What does the file registry.dat have to do with this?
Thanks for your help.
A.Gramatke
P.S.: Can i use mozilla with apache and mod_roaming?
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Arno Gramatke
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Phillip Davey
>since we got 150+ users, we would like to create a new directory in
>every users home drive, e.g. x:\netscape6, and copy a default-profile to
>that directory.
That's exactly what I want to do. I want to give each user their own copy
of a pre-defined (by me) profile.
> And that's were the problem is: how can we tell mozilla to look always
> in that directory for the profile like we used to do with Netscape 4.78?
No idea unfortunately.
> What does the file registry.dat have to do with this?
Netscape 6 seems to create a randomly named directory inside each profile
directory. The settings themselves are in this random named directory.
The registry.dat file seems to store the name of this directory, along
with a lot of other things. However, it is not a text file so I can't edit
it.
--
Phil
pd...@cam.ac.uk
--
--
Phil Davey
Computer Officer
Hughes Hall College, Cambridge
flacco
> gram...@zlw-ima.rwth-aachen.de (Arno Gramatke) writes:
>
>>since we got 150+ users, we would like to create a new directory in
>>every users home drive, e.g. x:\netscape6, and copy a default-profile to
>>that directory.
>
> That's exactly what I want to do. I want to give each user their own copy
> of a pre-defined (by me) profile.
US TOO. We have a common profile location, and a lot of users that share a
lot of Win9x and Win2K PC's. (I wonder if Netscape is willing to give this
any priority whatsoever since it starts to offer enterprise features that
they try to sell with Netscape / iPlanet.)
>>What does the file registry.dat have to do with this?
I believe this is just a profile registry that stores the location of each
profile. Not sure if anything else is stored in there.
This is a pain in the ass for us because we have mozilla installed on each
individual PC, but the location of the profile for each user will be the
same regardless of which PC they use:
X:\mozilla\<username>\
> Netscape 6 seems to create a randomly named directory inside each profile
> directory. The settings themselves are in this random named directory.
>
> The registry.dat file seems to store the name of this directory, along
> with a lot of other things. However, it is not a text file so I can't edit
> it.
The actual name of the random directory (the "salt" directory) does not
matter. As long as it's eight characters long plus the .slt extension,
mozilla will use it.
Mozilla stores this profiles list on the PC that mozilla is installed on.
What I would like to do is *bypass the profile registry entirely* and just
tell mozilla where the profile is located. Something like this:
mozilla -profiledir X:\mozilla\username\
Then mozilla would just go directly to this profile directory, look for a
salt directory, and use this location for all profile data.
On a Windows system, you could set up a batch file that pulls the user's
login name from the environment, so if you have a shared PC, you would just
need one shortcut to start mozilla on any PC for any user account:
mozilla -profiledir X:\mozilla\%NETNAME%\
We already do this with the -profile switch:
mozilla -PROFILE X:\mozilla\%NETNAME%\
...and this works fine on shared PC's, but the profile has to be set up at
least once beforehand on each one. It would be nice to get away from that.
Christian Biesinger
> but the profile has to be set up
> at least once beforehand on each one. It would be nice to get away from
> that.
mozilla -CreateProfile profilename
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