Stopping CSC with a GPO

Question

I have network drives mapped to my users.

If they lose network connection for any reason, it pulls up the client side cached version of it and lets the user work in that.

Now some duplicate files are popping up and people are seeing inconsistent versions of things.

I want to make it so that when a user loses network connection, they can't access the files. Period.

EDIT

I forgot to mention that my file servers are Linux-based samba shares

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Mar 09 '11 at 23:04

You don't need a GPO. You just need to turn off the caching support on the shares they're connecting to. The following instructions will vary slightly depending on the version of Windows hosting the shares, but the gist is the same. They were written from a 2008 R2 server.

Open the Properties for the shared folder they're connecting to
Go to the Sharing tab
Click Advanced Sharing
Click Caching
Select the option for "No files or programs from the shared folder are available offline"

That makes a bunch of sense and I'll use that when I get put in my Windows-based file server structure, but I forgot to mention that my file servers are Linux-based — blsub6, Mar 11 '11 at 21:39

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 12 '11 at 02:34

If you don't need "Offline Files" on any of your clients just disable it entirely using Group Policy. The "Allow or Disallow use of the Offline Files feature", located at "Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Network\Offline Files" in Group Policy will disable the feature computer-wide.

If you want to prevent caching of specific shares on your Samba servers you can use the "csc policy" configuration parameter in your smb.conf. You can find details here: http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/manpages-3/smb.conf.5.html#id2481437

Stopping CSC with a GPO

2 Answers2