Geek pop quiz!

[theweaselking]

Question: A person is logging into the same roaming profile from two machines at once (one WinXP Desktop, One Win2003 Terminal Server, both via RDP)

He sometimes logs out of one or the other.

He complains that settings stored in his profile for applications go missing - He uses the XP desktop to run Project, and his Project interface settings go AWOL roughly once a week.

Is it just me, or this is "exactly the behaviour I would expect from logging into the same profile from two machines at once"?

(Domain is samba/LDAP, not Active Directory. Original workstation that he's RDPing from is CentOS, where his home folder is ALSO this same profile mounted directly from a NAS device. If it matters.)

Comments

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

To my flimsy recollection... yes, this is what I would expect to happen, especially if there are programs open in the other session, he opens a new session, dicks with settings, saves/closes, then uses the same program that has been open all the time.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I don't *think* he's using the same programs in both places, but we're talking about Office apps in both places. Which might as well be the same program for a lot of things.

[skiriki.livejournal.com]

I just feel that it makes even more likely that this is the reason why it happens... but I may be a weebit cynical.

Alternatively, his settings do not port properly to his remote system due to reasons X, Y, and Z (anything from user right fuck-up to the position of the Moon in Virgo to software mismatch to software "just not feeling like it"), but they sure save nicely over the existing settings, which fucks up the other session...

[squidb0i.livejournal.com]

My focus was Citrix, but that's the basis for TS anyway, and I'm rusty by 7 years, but yeah, I think you're right. One profile at a time, userdude.

[xengar.livejournal.com]

I have no experience with some of the variables here, namely CentOS and samba/LDAP, but this is indeed the exact type of problem that I would expect from this situation. Even beyond what Skiriki said, I could see it trying to save settings when he logs out of one session and being unable to because they were in use on the other, and corrupting/losing settings that he had been using for a while. It's not supposed to... but we all know about large software packages and supposed to, don't we.

[lurkerwithout.livejournal.com]

Its just you. Crazy, crazy, paranoid you...

[maelorin]

he's lucky that it's not going sideways more often.

double-dipping like this is inherently unstable: *especially* for ms office, but also for applications on winboxen in general. consider the effects of propagation time; login instances as isolated chunks of memory that can't (shouldn't) talk to each other; and perhaps also file lock conflicts.

one might be able to get away with it if they were *completely* different applications, but office apps (can) share all manner of 'common code' subunits, config file locations and so on. and some things will depend upon how - and where - these user-specific files are stored.

the last-to-logout profile will overwrite any/many conflicting settings made under the other one. this is the way things are *supposed* to happen. just as if brainiac had logged in, logged out, logged back in, then logged out again. only it may not be a smooth update. especially if he changes local variable settings in one instance, but not the other.

i have done this kind of terminal-fu myself in the past - on various setups - and i went to great lengths to be consistent on winboxen about which apps i ran where, and when - and in which order i killed login instances. but things would still get hinky. *not* my preferred way of working on winboxen.

[elmo-iscariot.livejournal.com]

His problem is that he needs to hold his lituus vertically when marking out the templum. If he keeps on holding it horizontally, he'll attract the ire of the Dirae, who will confound his readings out of spite.

[andrewducker]

Yes. I see this all the time. People logged into a base unit, and then into a TS session, change some settings, log out of the TS session, log out of the base session, and then wonder where their settings have gone...

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Each session will be trying to lock some of of the same files and Local User bits of the registry (some of which is stored in his profile and loaded when he logs in) so yeah, this and worse is totally expected.