[Samba] Roaming Profiles under Linux clients

[Denis Cardon]

Hi Mario,

>> Any ideas how to implement roaming profile under Linux as the clients?
>
> pam_csync http://www.csync.org/ seems to be pretty close to a direct
> feature-equivalent for linux.

Csync indeed seems to be the closest match I found too. Unfortunatly the 
project does not seems very lively, last release was in 2010 and the 
developpement trac interface is down... However the blog linked on the 
main page talked about csync recently 
(http://blog.cryptomilk.org/2012/03/21/synchronize-two-folders-on-a-mac-and-other-unix-systems-with-csync/) 
so I might still give it a try.

If anyone has some experience with that, I'm interested in earing from 
them, especially the bad cases scenario (two sessions opens concurently, 
clock skew, etc.).

> though such a thing is not always appropriate, nfs or pam_mount will
> be faster and easier to maintain if you don't need the clients to be
> able to work off-line.

In the past, I've been using nfs for home directory export but I've 
never have been able to make file ACL working right (share ACL, defaults 
ACL, usmask and all).

Then I switched to CIFS mounting and the ACL issue is now resolved. 
However when you have 40 users with badly written userland programs 
pounding 'round the clock on their CIFS mounted home, it gets tought for 
the file server. I'd prefer for that bunch of mostly useless random io 
to stay locally than to be transfered to the server.

Roaming profile is a pain to maintain, but mounted home share are not a 
solution either in my use case.

note : I had some bad time with pam_mount. I would advise to use 
pam_script and handling the mounting in your own script, it is much more 
versatile and easier to debug.

Cheers,

Denis


-- 
Denis Cardon
Tranquil IT Systems
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