Workshop

• Make checklists of tasks that must be completed
• Keep good records
• Write down a detailed rollout plan, shoot holes in it, and refine the plan
• Resist the temptation to deviate from the plan
In short, the characteristics of a good network rollout—big or small—are basically your good work
habits translated to the computing arena. Try to think of any network rollout as a factory job or as a
cookie-cutting session: Anything done to one network object must be done to the next network object.
Although you can manually configure each object identically, unless you’re quite the machine, there’s no
guarantee that each object will be exactly the same.
Power Tool Time
Your network operating system provides you with the basic tools to help you in your consistency quest:
• User templates These enable you to copy an existing user.
• User-level login scripts Login scripts exist to perform various startup configurations, such as
adding a PATH to a user’s environment, showing a message of the day, and so on. User-level
login scripts are scripts that are run when an individual user logs in.
• Organizational or group-level login scripts Organizational or group scripts run when
anybody from that group or organization logs in.
• User network profiles Network profiles are network-stored configuration information, such as
your Windows desktop, Start menu, preferences, and so on. (We’ll discuss these in more detail
later in this hour.)
User Templates
User templates are awesome, but they’re really just a takeoff of what network administrators have been
doing for years: Creating a “Joe User,” testing him out, and then duplicating all his attributes for the
other users. As a matter of fact, the only network operating system I know of that actually has a
formalized facility for user templates is NetWare (via Novell’s NDS). Other systems have various user
copy utilities—and frankly, these work just fine, as long as you remember to use them. Figure 16.1
shows the copy user feature for Windows NT.