sporticia

So the title of this post should be something like ‘iphone will not sync with itunes on vista with roaming profile folders’, but I couldn’t resist, ibroken sums it up so well :o)

Yep, my iphone won’t work with my office PC. Well, mine does obviously as I am an administrator with god like powers on our office network. But for my poorer cousins, the standard user, they have their environment subtley controlled for them via the use of microsoft group policies.

The policies in place are not restrictive in nature. They are  simply there to help make certain things transparent to them or make my life easier as an admin and give me some peace of mind about my users data.

The one causing the breakage of the iphone sync is the roaming user profile folder(s). We use roaming profiles to allow people in the office to be able to login to any desktop and have their personal settings follow them around. We also redirect the ‘documents’ folder to a network location so that all their files are in one place and backed up for security.

Under Windows Vista, the user profile folder(s) structure changed a bit. in  Windows XP, user profiles were stored in”C:\Documents and Settings”, but in Windows Vista they are now stored in “C:\Users\”. in order to maintain backwards compatibilty with earlier windows software, Windows Vista has a junction point for ‘C:\Documents and Settings” that points it to “C:\Users” (a junction point is a bit like a shortcut but it will also work in DOS). The junction point makes sure that any application trying to access “C:\Documents and Settings” gets directed to “C:\Users”

Microsoft also changed the structure of the folders that make up the user profile under Windows Vista

\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data

now points to

\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming

and

\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data

now points to

\Users\<user>\AppData\Local

And I *think* this may be where the problem is. NTFS juntion points can only point to another location on the local file system, not a netwok location. itunes will be trying to access “C:\Documents and Settings\scottb\Local Settings\Application Data”, and will be hitting the junction point that redirects it to “C:\Users\scottb\AppData\Romaing”. With folder redirection turned off the story ends here, the location is still on the local filesystem, itunes simply follows the new file path and backups up the iphone in the correct location.

But we have this folder redirected to a network share using a group policy, the “C:\Users\scottb\AppData\Romaing” gets further redirected to a network share file path……and it all just fails.

At this time however, this is only a theory as I cannot understand why only itunes is affected like this and not any other apps (who must also be getting the network redirect for the AppData folder !).

More on this [as|when|if] I figure it out………

ibroken