[Samba] WinXP maps home drive to logon home

[Ron Smith]

Ron Smith wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am having a "logon home" problem. I have a mixture of Win98 and WinXP
> machines and regardless which I use to connect to the Samba server, it
> will try to map the home drive to what I have set the "logon home = " to.
That's not quite correct, only the WinXP machine will try to use the 
value of "logon home" as the home folder.

> This is the line .. "logon home = \\%N\profile.%U"
> The user is admin
> This is the error I see in the syslog from a Win98 Machine:
>    lab_thinkpad (192.168.30.180) couldn't find service profile.admin
> and from a WinXP machine:
>    genserv-lab4 (192.168.30.184) couldn't find service profile.admin
> 
> If I create a folder in the home share called "profile.admin", then 
> WinXP will map the Home drive to it instead of the parent of 
> profile.admin. If I remove the logon home line from the smb.conf file, 
> WinXP will map the Home drive to the home share root correctly, but the 
> Win98 client will put the profile information in the home share root, 
> and I want it in a folder called profile.%U under the home share.
I'm replying to my own post ....
I still don't know why a Windows XP machine will try to use the "logon 
home" value as it's home folder instead of what's in the /etc/passwd 
file on the Samba PDC, but until I find out, I came up with a 
work-around. I changed "logon home = \\%N\profile.%U" to "logon home = 
\\%N\profile.%a", so that when a user at a Win98 machine logs on, his 
profile is stored in the profile.Win95 folder. When that user is at a 
WinXP machine and logs on, it looks for a profile.WinXP folder, doesn't 
find it and uses the correct home folder instead.

R Smith