Storing roaming profiles in home directories.

[eirvine]

Akop Pogosian wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 3 Dec 2000, David Bannon wrote:
> 
> > At 12:19 AM 3/12/2000 -0800, Akop Pogosian wrote:
> > >Is there anything wrong with storing the roaming profiles in home
> > >directories which are also mapped to a drive letter when the users log
> > >on? That's what I do, seems to work fine. However, someone mentioned
> > >in the past that this is not a good thing to do.  I can't remember his
> > >reasons anymore. Does anyone know what are the disadvantages of doing
> > >this?
> > >
> >
> > Yes, I do the same thing on one domain I administer. The only problem is
> > that users see the profile there and sometimes have a little play with it.
> > I had one new user who who thought she had to save her files there, inside
> > 'My Documents'. Of course everything changed when she logged out and her
> > local profile was copied onto the server....
> >
> > David
> 
> FYI,  just found the following in the Samba PDC faq:
> 
> |4.1.1.  Why is it bad to set "logon path = \\%N\%U\profile" in smb.conf?
> |
> |Sometimes Windows clients will maintain a connection to the [homes] (
> |or [%U] ) share even after the user has logged out.  Consider the
> |following scenario.
> |
> |user1 logs into the Windows NT machine.  Therefore the [homes] share
> |is set to \\server\user1.
> |user1 works for a while and then logs out.
> |user2 logs into the same Windows NT  machine.
> |
> |However, since the NT box has maintained a connection to [homes] which
> |was perviously set to \\server\user1, when the operating system
> |attempts to get the profile and if it can read users1's profile, will
> |get it otherwise it will return an error.   You get the picture.
> |
> |A better solution is to use a separate [profiles] share and set the
> |"logon path = \\%N\profiles\%U"
> |

I have not observed this behaviour on Win98, and I too store my user's
profiles in a .winprofile directory in their home directory.
 
Unfortunately this design decision proved disasterous when I tried to
switch clients over to NT4 SP6. NT4 seems to maintain the 
HOME connection more often than not, even when using the 
PERSISTENT NO switch.
 
Eddie.