Appsense Firefox Personalisation Settings (well redirect to network drive)

Its a bit of a misleading title actually as the following process can be used instead of using the Appsense personalization settings to manage Mozilla Firefox.

This technique was used due to the large amount of data that firefox was consuming and concerns over placing this all in appsense personalization.

Redirection technique
The following technique can be used to redirect mozilla firefox to store its data on a network drive. This means that NO firefox settings are required in appsense personalization, we only use appsense EM policy to manage the changes to the applications configuration to redirect it to the network drive.

The changes to Firefox need to be performed before Firefox.exe is launched so these can be placed either in logon, or post logon trigger in newer versions.

Each Logon
1.) Manipulate Profiles.ini
         Create a profiles.ini file in the users %appdata%\mozilla\firefox directory
         The profiles INI file controls the location where firefox files will be stored.
         The name and Path fields here should be edited.

              Name =xxx.profile
              Path=\\server\share\%username%\AppSettings\Firefox



On first Run
The following tasks are only required for the first time a user launches firefox. This will create the user a new firefox profile onto the location specified in the path set above in the INI file.

2) Check if this is the 1st run of the application.
         We need to perform a check to see if the user has created a profile before.
          For Example Look for H:\Appsettings\Firefox\Profiles\xxx.profile\prefs.js

3) Create a directory to place the user profile (if above did not exsist)
       For Example H:\Appsettings\Firefox\Profiles

4)  Run the firefox profile creation tool. This creates a new profile in the directory detailed in the profiles.ini updated earlier.
       eg. Firefox.exe -CreateProfile xxx.Profile