[Samba] Roaming profiles on a small network

[Matthew Easton]

On Sunday 14 March 2004 05:20, Matt Janes wrote:
  Im having
> great diffiuculty synching the data, email, etc on my laptop and desktop,
> so I thought I might configure samba to act as a DC and use roaming
> profiles to make sure that my data is always synched.  My question is this:
> is it worth the effort?  

If you are using Outlook or Outlook Express for email, roaming profiles in 
their default configuration won't help you unless you are also doing all your 
mail via imap, (or perhaps running a corporate MS Exchange server).  That's 
because there is a hidden "Local Settings" folder in your profile that does 
not get synched with the server--- and that's where the email data store 
lives.  So you must move your outlook.pst file into "My Documents" or 
somewhere that DOES sync.  This can work with Outlook, but I'm not sure 
whether you can do this sort of thing with Outlook Express. And I don't know 
if this exposes you to a greater likelihood of data corruption down the line.  
Some other mail clients (Eudora for sure) will by default store data in a 
syncable location.

Roaming profiles can be annoying when your computers are very different from 
each other -- On one or the other machine, you may have startup items that 
generate error messages, and task bar shortcuts that don't work, for example.

In my experience, roaming profile users occasionally find that they are unable  
to download or upload their profiles due to 'file in use' errors, or filename 
weirdness (usually netscape cache files, but also favorites, or email 
attachments.)  As the administrator of your LAN, you will be able to resolve 
these issues by moving or renaming the offending files so you should consider 
this a minor inconvenience rather than a deal-killer.