[Samba] Re-Creating Windows Profiles After SAMBA Migration

[Irving Carrion]

Thanks For Your Response Jay!

Maybe I should clarify what I'm trying to do.  We have never used
roaming profiles nor desire to do so with SAMBA.  When we were on a NT
network all profiles were stored locally.  Now that we replaced the NT
PDC with the SAMBA PDC those local profiles no longer work.  We have to
change domain, then reboot.  Logon as the new user, then copy all
documents from the old profile to the new one.   Reconfigure MS Outlook
then import existing PST's into the new profile.  

I think the key is to tell Windows 2000 that this user is not new and to
continue using the old profile.

What do the BIG (500-2000 PC's) companies do to migrate to SAMBA away
from NT?  Are they reconfiguring all 2000 machines?

Any insights would be helpful.

Many Thanks!

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Ts [mailto:jay at jayts.cx] 
Sent: Thursday, August 22, 2002 4:24 PM
To: Irving Carrion
Cc: samba at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: [Samba] Re-Creating Windows Profiles After SAMBA Migration

On Thu, Aug 22, 2002 at 01:41:18PM -0400, Irving Carrion wrote:
> 
> Many thanks to the SAMBA community and developers!!
> 
> We have successfully migrated away from NT and now use SAMBA
> LOGON / FILE server.

Congratulations!!!

> Windows 98 pc's were easy as changing the
> domain name doesn't affect any of the profiles so all docs / pst were
in
> the correct location.  Windows 2000 though... NIGHTMARE!!!  

My own experience with roaming profiles is that they can turn into
a "nightmare" very easily, so _do_ be careful with them.

> Has anyone on the list figured out a better way of migrating
individual
> PC's so that Windows 2000 uses the same profile it had originally
before
> changing domain names.  I've tried manually copying the old profile to
> the new one, but It still thinks it is a new user and does NOT retain
> any of the MS Outlook settings.

I really don't know the answer to this, but since you didn't say
anything
about it, make sure that all of the files in the profile directory have
their modification dates set accordingly.  If Windows sees a newer
profile
on the local system, it may try to use it, and later wipe out the copy
on the server.

Now (and no promises that it will help, but), can you describe your
situation, and what you are doing more completely? The usual method
would be to switch the PDC from Windows to Samba, and when the Windows
system logs on, it notices that the local version of the profile is
"newer", or something like that, and offers to use it instead of the
one on the server, then it copies it to the server when the user
logs off.

At that point, and not a moment later, it is prudent to make a backup of
the profile directory on the Samba server and archive it.  I hope you
have
done that!  From there, you can copy it and use it for other users.  I
*think* this does work, at least it did in my little experiments here.

Now, about the different domain names: look on your Windows systems,
in the "C:\Documents and Settings" folder.  You should see folders
named like "user.WINNTDOMAIN" and "user.SAMBADOMAIN".  This is where
the profiles are kept, on a user-by-user and domain-by-domain basis.

Now: did you try copying the WinNT domain version to the Samba server,
so the user will get it as his/her roaming profile?  I'm not quite
sure what the exact method would be -- whether it's necessary to
delete, copy, or rename the profile on the client -- but by making
lots of backups from which you can recover, maybe you can try different
ways.  (BTW, modifying/deleting the client profiles can be a real
bear of a task; you probably need to logon to the local client -- a
local logon rather than a domain logon -- as the Administrator, to
make changes to a user profile.  The ACLs on the profiles are 
somewhat complicated.)

I don't know if any of this helps, but I hope it does!

Jay Ts