[K12OSN] IE requirement

[Barry Solof]

I'll confirm that this trick works for Firefox 0.8. 

We've just updated about 250 seats from Netscape 4.x to Firefox 0.8.  They now keep their profile up on their home drives.

Basically, before using Firefox for the first time, start it with the profile manager command ("firefox -profilemanager").  Create a generic profile with the files pointing to the drive of your choice.

We use Novell's app launcher to distribute this automatically to the workstations.  There were a few gotcha's (many of which are explained in the Novell CoolSolutions or AppNotes papers).  Long one short, we spent a few hours working on the application and it distributed to hundreds of computers the first time they clicked on the Firefox icon.  

In an unrelated (but sort of interesting) issue, we turned off local caching of files. We use a squid proxy server and found that setting the local disk cache to 0 (not caching anything locally) seems to be faster than the browser caching to either the c: or h: (home) drives.  Again, we didn't expect this ... but it works!

Barry

>What I did was create a generic netscape user on a
>machine with a netscape username of "Netscape" and
>then copied that directory to each user's home
>directory. Then at each Windows workstation I'd
>install Netscape and setup the user "Netscape" to use
>the profile in drive "U:\Netscape" where U: was the
>users mapped home drive. This setup worked just fine
>and I had user roaming profiles for Netscape. I assume
>that Mozilla will work the same way. I did this with a
>Netware server. I assume it would work with a Samba
>server too.