Auto Netscape

Many systems administrators are familiar with users who flood Help desks with questions about protocols or other settings when running an email client or Web browser for the first time. In large user environments where you might have many user settings spread over the file system, you need to devise ways to automatically configure these user settings so all users get a standard configuration. I went searching for just such a solution.

I run a small single-domain lab in a school where over 10,000 students share 40 Windows NT computers. Users can log on to any computer in the lab and get their personal settings. But with so many users, plenty of the students don't know how to configure their personal settings for all the applications on the network. To help the students, I set up a series of batch files and logon scripts to automatically configure the user settings. Let's look at an example that involves autoconfiguring the user settings for Netscape Navigator. The principles in this example suit other applications as well.

Starting Netscape
The first time you start Netscape after a standard installation, you must enter several settings (e.g., a username, a mail server, the appropriate mail protocol). If another user logs on to the same system and attempts to use Netscape, that user must repeat this process and create an individual user profile. Because Netscape supports multiple user profiles, users must select their profiles from the Netscape profile selector the next time they log on to the same computer. All user profiles reside on the local disk by default. Depending on the situation, you might have hundreds or thousands of user profiles on one machine, which makes finding a profile in the profile selector difficult. Such was the case in my lab.

Although Netscape stores user profiles locally by default, you can store this information in at least two other places: NT's roaming profile or a home directory. In my example I'll use the home directory, which I store on a drive in a UNIX file system over Samba. You can put the home directory on any server (e.g., NT, Novell, UNIX). You specify the home directory and the drive in the User Manager for Domains, and the drive mounts when the user logs on. All users within a network have the same home drive letter, which in my case is the letter Z.

I write-protected the local disk on each computer in my lab, so users must store documents in the only writeable place, the home directory. However, Netscape stores the paths pointing to each user profile in the local Registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Netscape\ Communicator\Users\<profilename> or a similar location depending on the version of Netscape. This schema can get quite complicated with thousands of profile paths. Netscape's profile selector will still pop up for each user who tries to access the Web browser, and the Registry entries remain in the system even after the systems administrator deletes the user account. Consequently, the number of entries grows until the Registry is corrupted.

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