I have a coworker with an XP system and a 98 system on a wireless network. Her husband wants to be able to run netscape on either system and have access to his localaly stored mail from both systems. I don’t see a a way to specifiy the location of a user profile whats the easiest way to to this?
Bump
Mozilla (and, I assume, Netscape as well) are not currently designed to do this.
In theory you can do something like this as follows: From one computer, create a new profile in a directory visible from both computers (Tools > Switch Profile > Manage Profiles, etc.). Now exit Mozilla on the first computer and do the same steps on the second computer, choosing the same directory as you chose last time. Mozilla seems to use the existing files (I tried this, with a 2000 and XP box) so the bookmarks are preserved across the two computers. (Warning: look closely at the two directories to make sure they match; you have to choose the parent of the “username” directory.)
However, there is a big problem with file synchronization. The bookmarks.html file, for example, is read only on startup and only updated sporadically (possibly only on exit; I’m not sure). There are similar problems with the cache, passwords, and other user data stored in the profiles directory. I suspect that this would work as long as you could guarantee that only one instance of Mozilla was running at a time, but that’s kind of a big hassle for networked computers.
You could do this quite easily with a unix type system - just share the directory on one computer and mount it in the correct place on the second one and don’t use Netscape simultaneously on both machines.
With Windows, you are pretty well stuck. I can’t see any easy way to do it. You’d have to point the Netscape on one PC to a mapped network drive somehow. At best we’re talking registry hack, at worst we’re talking recompile the program. Not easy at all.
You might do what I do:
Run your own Web server and mail server, complete with web mail system. Lash the thing to DSL and rig it to stay on line 24 hours a day. Register with DynDNS and rig your server to keep your address up to date. You can then reach your email from anywhere in the world.
I’m such a geek.
No registry hacking needed. You can define new user profiles in Netscape/Mozilla to point to an arbitrary filesystem location, including a network-mounted drive. As long as you never use the two instances of Netscape simultaneously, this should work (and worked in my short test). The problem (on either a Unix or a Windows platform) is the lack of file synchronization at the application level, which could pretty easily lead to profile corruption if you ever accidentally use both at once.