Moving user home directories

Question

How do I move my users' home directories to another server or disk?

Symptoms

N/A

Resolution

Instructions

This article is provided for guidance only and covers network management topics not specifically related to Ranger. Questions regarding these issues should be directed to your dealer. Sentinel does not provide for these issues.

Moving User Home Directories 

There are three main considerations when moving home directories:

(1) Recreating the NT/2000 share that is lost when a directory is moved.
(2) Resetting the permissions on the home directory and all sub-folders and files
(3) Ensuring the home directory path is correctly entered in the user's NT account information

In general, the following procedure can be used to move home directories from one location to another.

Copy the home directories to the new location.

On the server upon which the home directories are located...

Assuming the user home directories are at "d:users" in DOS, create A text file listing the location of each user's home directory folder:

1. dir d:users*. /b > list1.txt
2. Copy and paste the contents of this list into this excel spreadsheet.
3. Modify the value in the path column appropriately.
4. Copy the values in column C into a text file called go.bat.
5. Open a cmd window.
6. Run the go.bat batch file.
7. Check the created shares.
8. Copy the values in column D into a text file called go2.bat.
9. Open a cmd window.
10. Run the go2.bat batch file.

This should process each user's home directory resetting permissions on all folders, files and sub-folders. The default permissions are Domain Admins (full), System (full) and the user (full). (These can be modified if necessary by changing the formulae in the spreadsheet)

Use Ranger Account Manager to change accounts' home folder paths to the correct UNC path.

i.e. serverusername

Note: If you want the shares to be hidden then modify the formulae in the spreadsheet to
add a sign after the share name

ie. net share fredd:users00fred

and change the account's home folder path to serverusername