How to enable Windows Terminal Services home drive redirection on Windows 2000.

User’s home location, specified in the user Active Directory account object, normally points to a network location. However, this reconnection takes up a considerable amount of time during user logon. A feature available within the Microsoft Windows system allows the server to redirect the user’s home location to a local drive. But this feature is available as a default for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and above. All is not lost for Windows 2000 as Microsoft has provided a feature fix for users of Windows 2000.

What is required here is that a Microsoft-provided patch can be applied to a Microsoft Windows 2000 Server to take advantage of this feature. The Hotfix description can be obtained from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/843261

This hotfix can be applied to the server and home location re-direction setting can be configured in the Windows Registry. Details follow:

Hotfix Executable: Windows2000-KB843261-v3-x86-ENU.EXE

Settings applied:

Key: HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Terminal Services

Value

WFHomeDir

Type

REG_SZ

Data

E:\DataHomedrives

Description

This configures the home location for all users that log on to the server

Value

WFHomeDirDrive

Type

REG_SZ

Data

H:

Description

Drive letter for the mapping if the WFHomeDir is a network location. This is not required but here we set it to H:

Value

WFHomeDirUNC

Type

REG_DWORD

Data

0x0

Description

This indicates if the data set in the ‘Value’ above is a UNC path

E:\DataHomedrives must be configured to give the server local ‘users’ group read/write permissions.
With this configured, E:\DataHomedrives will be filled with folders and files for each unique users that log on to the servers. These folders and files are temporary. Therefore, for housekeeping purpose, a script can be incorporated into the server startup file to perform regular clean up.

The registry values above can be applied via the Active Directory Group Policy objects when you want to manage it centrally on a collection of servers.