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at our association we are running Windows Server 2012 Essentials, so that our members can log on with their own accounts.

Recently, it happened that someone didn't log off their Dropbox account and when someone else logged on, he could access the account of the other. This has now happened twice, but never before (at least that I know). It also happened only with Dropbox (not with other serices - as said: AFAIK) and only with Firefox.

Probably the biggest problem is that I can't reproduce the problem. I've tried several times now logging in with my own account and then letting someone else log in on that PC. However, on his account Dropbox then was always logged off or he was himself logged in with his account (that was when he didn't log off the last time he used Dropbox - which is the right behaviour).

I know this is a really vague problem, so my question is really: What can I do to find out more about the problem? Is there something I could to to be able to reproduce the problem? Is there something else I could try?

I'm really glad for every help I get!

brgr
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1 Answers1

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It also happened only with Dropbox (not with other serices - as said: AFAIK) and only with Firefox.

It seems like the problem is related to Firefox, rather than Dropbox, because this suggest your users are logging in to Dropbox through the browser instead of Dropbox desktop.

Before June 2015 this was actually the only way to access Dropbox on a multi-user Windows system where users didn't have administrative privileges (as it should be). By default, Dropbox still needs an administator account for installation despite it gets installed to %AppData%\Roaming\Dropbox\bin\. Since Dropbox Desktop 3.6 there has been enterprise installer for deploying Dropbox Business, which allows installation for all users (Program Files (x86)\Dropbox as installation directory). This may be one potential solution, if not to avoid this problem at least to improve usability.

By default, Firefox stores users' data, profiles, to %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ and cache to %LocalAppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles. This location should be only accessible by the logged in user, and there shouldn't be any reason why in default conditions another profile gets loaded. You can check %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini if the Path= has anything abnormal.

Probably the biggest problem is that I can't reproduce the problem.

Have you certainly ruled out that the previous user was actually logged out from Windows and the other user was using his own account? I mean, that you have actually seen this happen, not only reported by the users? There's a good possibility that the system is actually working as designed.

Esa Jokinen
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