Can somebody who deals with Bare Metal restore of Windows Workstations
please help me out?
SOME BACKGROUND:
The "user profile" for WinNT/Win2K workstation contains much of the user's
desktop customization. It includes things like font preferences and
wallpaper, and also some application customization settings (such as MS
Outlook).
The user profile is stored in NTUSER.DAT, and is also loaded as the
"HKEY_CURRENT_USER" registry key when the user is logged on.
For WinNT workstation and the ADSM 3.x clients, getting a good backup of the
user profile was a problem for some sites.
(Now if you only back up Windows servers, and not desktops, you probably
don't want to read any further. User profiles do exist on servers, but
generally nobody cares about getting them backed up because almost no
customization gets done for admin ids that log on to the server console.
Reading further will only confuse you and make your head hurt....)
The profile can be restored using either a good ADSM backup copy of
NTUSER.DAT, or a good backup of the HKEY_CURRENT_USER registry key from
adsm.sys. The problem was that if the backup was run via the scheduler
while the user was logged on, NTUSER.DAT was not backed up (it's locked
while the user is logged on), and the user's HKEY-CURRRENT_USER registry key
wasn't backed up either because the scheduler runs under the SYSTEM id, not
the user's id.
This problem was discussed several times on this list in the past 2 years.
This is the problem described by WSC flash 9707, or APAR IC16250 (closed
SUG). The workaround is to put a .bat file in the user's startup group that
runs a DSMC REGBACK USER CURUSER, to force a backup of the registry key when
the user logs on.
IF YOU'VE MADE IT THIS FAR, NOW HERE'S MY QUESTION!
In testing with the TSM 3.7.2.01 client and Win2K, it APPEARS to me that the
TSM client is saving the profiles of all logged on ids into adsm.sys, even
when the backup is run by the scheduler, which resolves IC16250.
I haven't found anything addressing this in the READMES, don't know if it
started somewhere prior to 3.7.2.01, or if I'm just deluding myself!
IC16250 is still in the IBM data base as closed SUG.
Has anybody else tested this, or seen what (I think) I'm seeing?
It would sure make our upgrade from ADSM to TSM clients easier if we can
drop the REGBACK workaround. But I don't want to drop it, if this is just
an accident that won't be supported in later releases of the client!
Can anybody else confirm this for me?
Thanks
************************************************************************
Wanda Prather
The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
443-778-8769
wanda_prather AT jhuapl DOT edu
"Intelligence has much less practical application than you'd think" -
Scott Adams/Dilbert
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