[K12OSN] Management--in regards to IE requirement

Terrell Prude', Jr. microman at cmosnetworks.com
Mon May 24 11:30:14 UTC 2004


Les Bell wrote:

>"Terrell Prude', Jr." <microman at cmosnetworks.com> wrote:
>
>  
>
> So far, Netscape 7 has worked just
>dandily in this scenario, and I don't see why either "classic" Mozilla
>or Firefox wouldn't.
><<
>
>With roaming profiles, Terrell? We used to use Netscape 7.1, but when I
>introduced roaming profiles, the problems with NS started, and I couldn't
>find a way around it. The Mozilla website certainly states that Moz doesn't
>support roaming profiles. However, I'm hopeful that Firefox might be
>better, as IE has been troublesome: it keeps losing the proxy settings,
>requiring them to be reset by a registry patch (.reg) file, and it
>periodically decides to abandon our intranet site as the home page and
>phone home to Microsoft (lots of people suffer from that problem). Then
>there's the times it decides it wants you to dial before it will connect,
>even though you're sitting on a LAN with 10 Mbps connection to the
>Internet.
>
>Trust me, I wouldn't use IE if I didn't feel we were forced to. . .
>
>Best,
>  
>

You're not.  Again, Ghost is your friend here.  When I've set up 
Mozilla, for example, I just did so as Administrator and set up the 
default Mozilla profile.  I checked the box that says don't bother 
asking which profile to use.  After you do that, *then* make your Ghost 
image and blow it to your clients.  All users get to use Mozilla w/o 
going through the Mozilla profile setup, and I didn't have to do a 
special "profile set-up" as my non-Administrator user when I fired it 
up.  Same for Firefox 0.8, BTW.

Why does this work?  It's because you're telling Mozilla to always use 
this locally-stored Mozilla profile, regardless of the user who logs 
into the machine.  Such has been my experience, anyway.  Yep, it's a 
workaround, but it does work.  I've heard others on the list say that 
the Windows roaming profile issue was solved anyway w/ Firefox, so this 
might not even be an issue at all anymore.

Of course, the whole issue itself could be avoided by the use of K12LTSP 
or something else like it, but I don't know if your Powers That Be would 
go for that.

--TP





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