roaming profiles in tng-alpha0.14

[Jamie ffolliott]

Hi,

Here's my success with roaming profiles, with NT4 SP5 client and
tng-alpha0.14 server. They're basically working in general but still some
rough edges.  If anyone understands some more details, could you toss in
your comments?

- user1 first logs in, gets the roaming profile. After logout, the
'profiles' share is left open for a period of time and all other shares are
closed (home, netlogon & others).

- user1 logs in 2nd time, roaming profile loads, and smbstatus shows the old
profiles share is still open on the same PID from the first login along with
the regular shares that were opened again on this PID.  After logout, both
the profiles and netlogon shares are left open on this PID.  I've noticed
this is the place where roaming profiles usually break down the next time a
user logs in from this machine.

- user2 logs in for the first time, and smbstatus shows the regular shares
open along with profiles and netlogon all using the same old PID, but
profiles and netlogon are still open as user1 and the rest of the shares are
open as user2.  user2 logs out and leaves only the profiles share open as
user1.

* I think there's been a lot of discussion before about the netlogon share
that is left open, and it's been explained to be a client bug and not a
problem with Samba per se, however NT Server somehow deals with it.

- user2 logs back in and waits awhile (anytime over 10 mins and 15 secs),
then logs out.  On the logout, user2 has regained the profiles share under a
new PID and left it open.  After a while of idleness (again about 10mins)
samba-tng has closed the profiles share that user2 had left open.  I have no
idea why the timing is important, but this is always reproducible.

* why does these shares close after 10 minutes, and why does it not happen
instead when the user who opened them logs out?

It seems what happens on networks with more users/workstations, that over
time users start to 'lose' their roaming profile and I've noticed this
happens when the netlogon and profiles shares are left open by the previous
user.  NT complains on login that it was unable to retrieve the profile and
creates a new one from the default profile.  You see the new roaming profile
named winnt\profiles\user1.001 on the client.  I'm guessing that maybe a
different smbd PID is handling the new share connections than the one that
currently holds the old netlogon and profiles shares that were left open,
however most of my experience with this problem was with samba HEAD from a
year ago (march 1999).

So how do you make sense of this?  I propose one solution that smbd (or
netlogond?) should close connections to any open shares when samba receives
a new logon request from a different user coming from the same machine (ie.
check uid and machine and IP of any open connections).  Or end the smbd PID
that maintains those connections if new connections are opened (from the
same machine) on a different smbd PID.  Closing shares shouldn't pose a
problem for NT since it just reopens them as needed (not sure how win95
handles this, but the proposed solution could give exception to win9x logins
and leave them open).

Some other weirdness..
- with level 100 logs turned on, some new messages pop up probably because
samba is slowed down on my P75 with all the logging ;)  On the first login,
I get "A slow network connection has been detected" - I select download
anyway and the roaming profile works anyway. On logout, it takes over a
minute of delay at a blank screen (after network connections are closed). On
the next login, I get "A domain controller for your domain could not be
found. You will be logged in with cached...".  Not sure if this behaviour
should be considered a bug, but it could make testing a bit more confusing.

I have about 6megs of level 100 logs separated for all the above points - if
you'd like them or if you have an idea what I should look for let me know.
It's a lot to go through though if I don't know what to look for ;)

cheers,
Jamie