Moving user home directories

Question

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

Symptoms

N/A

Resolution

N/A

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 support for the manual migration method indicated in this article.


Moving user home directories:

There are four main steps when moving home directories:

(1) Copy home directories to new location
(2) Recreate the NT/2000 share that is lost when a directory is moved.
(3) Reset the permissions on the home directory and all sub-folders and files
(4) Ensure the home directory path is correctly entered in the user's NT account information

Method 1 - Ranger Account Manager

UseRanger Account Manager's "Ranger Migrate" module to automate this process. This module was released with Ranger 4.4 and allows home directories to me moved between servers and hard drives in bulk.


Method 2 - Manual transfer

The following procedure can be used to move home directories from one location to another.



1) Copy

Copy the home directories to the new location.


2) Recreate shares

On the server upon which the home directories are now 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:

dir d:users*. /b > list1.txt



Copy and paste the contents of this list into column A of the Excel spreadsheet contained within this zip file.

Modify the value in column B to the users directory path.

Copy the values in column C into a text file called go.bat.



Open a cmd window.

Run the go.bat batch file.

Check the created shares.

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

3) Recreate permissions

Copy the values in column D into a text file called go2.bat.

Copy the y.txt file in the zip file to the same directory as the go2.bat batch file.

Open a cmd window.

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)


4) Modify account home directory paths

Use Ranger Account Manager to check that the users accounts' home folder path is correct. If you have moved the home directories to another server then modify the UNC path for the home directory and if appropriate the profile directory.

i.e. serverusername