[Samba] Reality Check -> Roaming Profiles

[Matthew Easton]

On Wednesday 08 December 2004 18:19, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> On 9 Dec 2004, at 12:07, Michael Lueck wrote:

>
> The main disadvantage of the Microsoft Windows approach is the
> bandwidth wasted while people log in and out.

In my experience, samba networks also have more problem with profiles becoming 
corrupted and not being able to copy down from the server or back up to it.  
I surmise it is differences in Win32 and Linux with respect to permitted 
characters and/or path length.

> Both methods "need to be fixed" IMHO - a fair middle ground would be to
> mark some portions of the "profile" as "volatile" (and thus they won't
> be copied back to the central store on logout), 
Windows and samba already do this -- you have an invisible "Local Settings" 
file in your Roaming profile where, for example, Outlook stores its .pst 
files.  It doesn't get copied up to the server.  Of course, I'd much rather 
email did get copied to the server -- leave the web browser cache behind 
instead.

> and the actual copying
> back and forth of non-volatile (I'm not going to use the word
> "permanent") data should use an optimised copy - something like rsync,
> which will only copy the changes. 

That would certainly be an improvement.