Help With Roaming Profiles

Given that I am normally quite proficient in most networking situations, but have absolutely no experience in a roaming profile setup, could anyone please help me with setting up roaming using profiles, or anything wherein I could have the systems at my job :

a. Not have to have the list of every person who needs to network to a particular system listed in their Control Panel/Users section

b. Have it so that if a password is changed on one system, it propegates to all other systems.

c. If a computer has a printer, it should not need to have each individual computer name who needs to use that printer listed in their control panels/user section

d. any other added benefits of roaming profiles.

I DO NOT HAVE windows 2000 server, so I am unsure whether this is even possible. Please answer asap, as it stands I have to shut down the server anyway, so if a reboot is needed or anything of the sort, this would concievably be the best time to do it.

 

Given what you want to do on your network, you'll need a server. You need some kind of centralized management on the network (Domain Controller).

However, just setting up Roaming Profiles all by themselves, it is possible, but if you don't have a Domain Controller, all users need to be set up on each workstation (Peer-To-Peer).

 

Is it possible using that as a server, or is it impossible without one of the servers (win NT 4.0 server, Win2K server, or Win2k3 server) I can recommend whichever's easiest to set up and use, so it's not a matter of cost so much as ease of use and efficiency with networking and most importantly what I've already mentioned. Hopefully i can get the answer fast enough to implement this week, because a great many executives are leaving for the week (really bad vacation timing for them, great for me since then i can fix up all the network problems they're having) so i won't get any *noticed* downtime

 

My advice would be to set up a Domain Controller (Win2kServ, Server2003, etc.) However, in doing that, you will need to join all workstations to that domain to get any use out of it.

 

until now, all my networking has been using peer-to-peer then. I'm really fast on the pickup, though, so i really just need a once-thru kinda thing. I mean, i install 2k3 server, or whatever I get, and then how do i set up the domain controller thing? Like do i run through the workgroups, tell them all they're part of a domain? do i need to set up security settings on the win2K3 system, or for that matter does that mean that without a network connection, the pc(s) would be completely unusable? That would honestly be a really good side benefit, for semi unmentionable reasons. Also, when i do that, what about networking printers that *aren't* connected to the server, but are connected to peers? For instance, we have a total of seven printers, on three computers. None are connected to the server, yet everyone needs to print to all of them. Thanks for all of your help thus far, at least i now know that without win2k server <or something server> I wouldn't be able to do it regardless of anything else i may have. That just saves me the trouble of arguing about why i need to do it.

 

After you install the server and give it a static IP address, go the RUN bar and type dcpromo. What that command does it prepare the server to be a domain controller.