User profile issues

[jon80]

At the office I run MS Vista Business with the fileserver/domain server/webserver/anything else server running Windows Server 2008.

The user profiles are configured (using folder redirection) so that the windows profile is hosted on the fileserver (e.g. \\server\users\jonathan).

Recently I had a few issues:

1. According to the admin's logs I was told I forgot to log off from a laptop before logging on to another terminal. Afaik, previous versions of windows used to warn the users when the user tried to log on to another terminal.

Is it considered safe to logon to more than one terminals, or, would it be helpful if a warning was displayed?

2. Windows profile does not load entirely. The desktop loads correctly however, the "My Documents" does not seem to be "looking at" the path expected.

My user does not have admin rights. Can I double check the UNC path where the profile should be read from? Is it possible to start this over, as in a refresh?

3. I cannot change my domain password, because windows displays a warning that it does not meet complexity etc requirements.

I have used password number 2.2 (ASAAAAAAANNNN) before and tried reverting
from a temporary password provided to technical support (e.g. p@ssw0rd1234) to work with again to password number 2, inverting a few numbers so that I hack around the rule that disallows me to use the same password over again. Why doesn't it work this time?

The funny thing is that after a restart I could not logon again, so I thought I forgot my password. I was getting an "incorrect password" error, although I'm confident I was keying in the same password.

Has anyone encountered similar issues?

Passwords I tried:

2.1. NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAS - accepted
2.2. ASAAAAAAANNNN - not accepted; maybe because I have used this password before (13 characters)

2.3. AAAAAAAANNNN - not accepted (12 characters)
2.4. AAAAAAAANNNNS - not accepted (13 characters)

where N = 0-9
A = a to z (lowercase)
S = special character e.g. $,%


3. We have been told that due to a recent issue with Windows Server 2008, the DHCP server was not allocating the IP addresses as expected. As a matter of fact the IP addresses were being allocated starting with '169.XX', and we had to use statically assigned IPs as a temporary workaround.

Does anyone have a link if this is a "known issue"?







Related links
1. Folder Redirection feature in Windows

 

[mmthomas]

1) Windows Server does not normally care the number of clients from which you are logged in, nor prevent or warn you when logging on to multiple times. If logging into a terminal server, the terminal server might be configured to only allow one session to a user, but I don't think you are talking about that. The only problem you might run into with the folder redirection is if you left a document open on another machine. Then you may be denied access to the document.

2) If you look at the properties of My Documents when redirection is working, it should show the target path. If the computer is not applying the policy correctly, you may want to run gpresult on the workstation and see if it tells you why it isn't applying the redirection policy.

3) Here are the basic complexity requirements for windows passwords. The password must contain characters from three of the following five categories:

* English uppercase characters (A through Z)

* English lowercase characters (a through z)

* Base 10 digits (0 through 9)

* Non-alphabetic characters (for example, !, $, #, %)

* A catch-all category of any Unicode character that does not fall under the previous four categories. This fifth category can be regionally specific.

Additionally, you may not use the entire username or full name of the account.
The administrator may also set length requirements.

4) 169.xx addresses are not assigned by DHCP. Rather, a machine will assign it's own 169.xxx address when it does not receive an address from any DHCP server.