USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

[Cleveland Metal]

I saw this a bit ago, and can't find it now. This may be available seperate as software I'm thinking too.

It was a USB Flash drive, and it kept all your windows profile info on it and you could go from machine to machine.

When you plug the drive in, it gave you the ability to log in with "your" profile stored on the drive, with all your personalized Windows Settings, IE favorites, etc. when you log out and take the drive, all your profile is gone from the machine (in theory).

Anyone seen or use one? Links?

[rjohnstone]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

Sounds interesting, but I would like to know how it gets around that pesky little thing called security.
I've seen smart cards used in conjunction with roaming profiles, but never seen roaming profiles stored on a USB drive.
I mean you can always copy your settings to a USB drive, but I don't think it's possible to "login" using them.

[Cleveland Metal]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

Hmmm, I could see what you mean. I wish I had looked at it closer when I saw it.

I mainly have a couple PCs that I use that when I'm not there I don't someone able to be able to access all my settings and info would like to be able to have the tweaked in settings portable so as to be able to move from one PC to the other and not have to change each them on every PC when I make a change to my Favorite or whatever.

And, I'd like the profile to be "gone" when I leave it and pull the USB disk. Sorta stealth. I'm already using some programs that lock down the favs, drives and files, and hides drives too, just trying to make it more stealth.Where it doesn't look like the stuff is there at all.

Any input would be cool. Thanks

[thurston]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

I like the idea of just booting up the computer from a USB drive and not accessing the local drive at all. I haven't looked into it with Windows, but I know there are some Linux Distributions you can set up like this. It's kind of like a LiveCD, but you can write to it.
That way you never touch any storage hardware on the system. Shut down, plug in the drive, reboot with all your info. Pull the drive and reboot and it's like you were never there beyond any ip logging you may encounter over the net.

[jim777]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

I think the machine might need to be set to use a roaming, rather than local profile, and also to check for that profile in a specific spot when it boots up. It would also need to know to save it there, and compare the roaming profile to the local one for timestamps, and use the newest version. It would also need some way to authenticate you as a user of that machine, or of the larger domain if it was on a network.
We have it setup that way at my bank. 41 thousand machines worldwide, and you always get your profile when you login, without any USB tools.

[Cleveland Metal]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

Is it possibly maybe the profile is setup on each PC, but the system looks to the USB drive for the profiles "tweaks" like IE favorites and things like that?

I haven't messed with that end of things much, so I really don't know the realities of it like have been mentioned.

Thanks again.

[jim777]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

You can't set up a system whereby you can just walk up to an unknown machine and have it load your profile from a portable drive. You should be able to setup a network of machines to look first in a particular spot for a roaming profile, but if you do that and it finds nothing, it will create a blank one on the the boot drive. That will cause you all sorts of application specific issues, as user specific application settings are stored inthe profile and in the registry's HKCU hive, which is also stored in the profile.
If you want this to work on a group of networked machines, they either need to have local profiles with group policies for network level groups, or roaming profiles. With local profiles, you would need a network permissioned group as a member of every PC's local groups (like Administrators, Power Users, Print Operators, etc) and then setup members of the group to look to a USB drive for their IE favorites (should be possible, as you can tell IE where to look for and store favorites). With a roaming profile, when you login and authenticate agains your PDC (or equivalent) your profile will copy down, and changes you make will be cached locally. Those changes will be copied up to your network profile area when you log out. You don't need a portable drive for that. If you setup IE to look for favorites on a portable drive, that would be an HKLM change, and effect everyone who logs onto that machine. Everyone would therefore need to have a drive to keep their favorites on or get a blank list.
For the most part, I think what you're looking for is something that needs to be set when the network is designed and implemented, not after the fact.

[hammer84]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

The jump drive he is talking about comes with a util that auto syncs certain files such as bookmarks, passwords, etc. It does not set a windows profile.

link to jump drive

[rjohnstone]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

[ QUOTE ]
The jump drive he is talking about comes with a util that auto syncs certain files such as bookmarks, passwords, etc. It does not set a windows profile.

link to jump drive

[/ QUOTE ]
That's what I thought he was talking about. Thx hammer.
It basicaly copies certain data from the "C:\Documents and Settings\%username%" folder over to the USB drive.

What jim777 is referring to is called roaming profiles, which only works on computers that are members of the same or trusted domain.

[Cleveland Metal]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

The Link Hammer just showed is pretty much what I think I must have seen. Actually better with the fingerprint security. I saw the fingerprint one earlier but it didn't mention that it had the other software that remembered your browser settings.

I still seems to remember the one I saw having the ability to basically keep your profile stored, like the way you have it setup with icon arrangements, colors, preferences etc etc.

I REALLY appreciate you guys taking time to write out your answers. Thank you.

[jim777]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

[ QUOTE ]
The jump drive he is talking about comes with a util that auto syncs certain files such as bookmarks, passwords, etc. It does not set a windows profile.

link to jump drive

[/ QUOTE ]

Pretty nifty! I've never seen one of those before. As I'm sure you know, you need local admin rights to install software on a Windows XP machine, so if you just walk up to one you don't have admin rights on, you're not going to be able to automate anything with it or install its software....Anyway [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] Where I work, we've disabled all the USB ports. Well, that's not really true, we've only locked the ones on the front of the PCs. Traders aren't smart enough to reach around the back! [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[rjohnstone]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

Jim you sound like you work at Charles Schwab... When I worked for them we unplugged the ribbon cables to the floppy and cd drives so the idiots would stop trying install shit.

[hippietim]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

[ QUOTE ]
you need local admin rights to install software on a Windows XP machine

[/ QUOTE ]

that is a common misconception. windows has no such requirement. unfortunately, 99% of all apps are written that way. windows is quite capable of running apps installed by a user, including registering COM components and such.

[hippietim]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

[ QUOTE ]
If you setup IE to look for favorites on a portable drive, that would be an HKLM change, and effect everyone who logs onto that machine. Everyone would therefore need to have a drive to keep their favorites on or get a blank list.

[/ QUOTE ]

actually, this is a per-user setting.

HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Exp lorer\User Shell Folders

Change the value of the Favorites key

[SeventhSon]

Re: USB Drive w/portable Windows user profile

warning...minor rant

<rant>
I think this is one of the few areas where Unix does this much better than Windows. On Unix everything regarding a user account is in a single folder hierarchy. You can move that top level directory to another device/location/USB device without breaking ANYTHING.

Windows sort of wants to put all your per-user info under c:\documents and settings\hippietim\. But it (or, more accurately, badly Windows applications) ends up putting bits and pieces of you all over the place. And once that's your "home" directory, it's pretty much chiseled in stone. There is no way to move that heirarchy to a different location/device without seriously fubaring things. the unsupported tweakui utility for moving my pictures, my music, etc. DOES NOT WORK.

I used tweak UI to move My Pictures to a external hard drive. That worked. But then Microsoft Digital Image Library completely broke because it couldn't find My Pictures. lol. Want premature gray hairs? Use Tweak UI to move My Documents.
</rant>

anyway, the moral of the story is that cleveland's scenario is trivial do with unix.