Using Firefox and Zotero in a Roaming Profile Environment

Yeshiva University

As our semester winds down we are starting to look at summer projects, one of which includes rolling out Firefox with Zotero university wide. Our university lab computers use roaming profiles and one of our concerns is exceeding the size allocation for student accounts (4 MB). In our experience, Firefox (without plug-ins) often requires greater amounts of space. If you include third-party items like Zotero, our students' profiles become corrupt. Therefore, I'm in the research stage of learning how other universities have successfully implemented Firefox and especially Zotero in a similar environment without problems.

-- Yeshiva University

noksagt

Do you have other diskspace that students can use? 4 MB is minuscule & will not be enough for anything, really. Zotero allows you to have a customized data directory. If users have more space elsewhere, just use that.

Depending on the scope of Zotero usage, you might get away with wiping the database on logout (encouraging users to export data or to sync, depending on what your setup). But disk space is cheap & I hope you offer your users more of it.

I have not ever been impressed with roaming profiles. For a center I setup, "My Documents" is mapped to a network drive & people are encouraged to store as much content their as is possible. Neither the roaming profile nor the "my documents" network drive has a quota. Most find out quickly that they don't want to load up their profile, though. Zotero is installed lab-wide. I actually think that the template account we used a database on the local machine or the public network drive so that casual users could export their data and/or share references (this was very much prior to the group functionality in the current beta). Most serious users change the storage location to their "my documents" network drive, though.

Yeshiva University

I understand you can relocate the Zotero Data, but what about the Firefox application data,temporary pages, etc? How do we redirect FF so it doesn't exceed the 4 mb file limit.

noksagt

That is not a question pertaining to Zotero & would be best answered through any of the numerous Firefox support channels.

There is most likely a better way to do it, but you can launch Firefox with the '-P' argument & point to a profile locate wherever you'd like.

noksagt

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_profile_folder

Yeshiva University

Can you recommend a few of these forums?

"As our semester winds down we are starting to look at summer projects, one of which includes rolling out Firefox with Zotero university wide. Our university lab computers use roaming profiles and one of our concerns is exceeding the size allocation for student accounts (4 MB). In our experience, Firefox (without plug-ins) often requires greater amounts of space. If you include third-party items like Zotero, our students' profiles become corrupt. Therefore, I'm in the research stage of learning how other universities have successfully implemented Firefox and especially Zotero in a similar environment without problems.

-- Yeshiva University"

noksagt

http://support.mozilla.com/
http://forums.mozillazine.org/

nbrubaker

I am considering the possibility of installing Zotero and allowing users to connect to a campus WebDAV server with credentials stored in their roaming profile. This way they can access the data easily over the summer while at home. Anyone else try this method? Or can offer insights in to potential pitfalls?