Brief questions :-)

[Martin Radford]

> 1) What are the reasons to NOT turn off local profile caching in an NT lab
> served by Samba?  Caching has caused too many headaches and ulcers and I'm
> preparing to wipe the lab clean next week (to fix many issues).  As I do,
> I really want to turn off the stupid caching.

I work at a university.  We configure our NT boxes to delete the
profile at logout.  We do this to prevent large numbers of profiles
building up on disk, taking up hundreds of megs of disk space.  If you
run out of space while downloading the profile, the PC tends to
blue-screen. 

> 2) When local profile caching is disabled, does NT just read all
> shortcuts, etc. off the network copy of the profile as it needs to?
> Although that may slow things down a little, I think that makes most
> sense, but I can never accuse Windows* of doing anything sensical.

It downloads the profile to disk when you log on.

> 3) What's the best way to restrict users from installing new programs?
> Could I do that in a policy?  If so, where is the best information on
> creating policies?  I know I could also just play some tricks with file
> permissions on each NT machine (such as make Program Files read-only) but
> that seems like too much work, and it could be circumvented, and I can see
> how it could cause problems with program temp files, etc...

In theory, applications are not supposed to write to Program Files.
(Of course, in practice, many do.)  However, depending on what
software you're running, you should be able to write-protect *most* of
Program Files .  The trouble is that you as soon as a user finds some
writable space, they can try installing software into it.  One other
trick is to limit the number of directories where users have execute
permissions.  If you can make sure that there isn't anywhere writable
that allows user execute you might have reached your goal.

> 4) Here's another annoying problem and I don't know who to blame, NT or
> Samba.  Occasionally when a user selects something from the Shut Down
> menu, the screen will do its "fade" and the hourglass appears, but at that
> point everything just seems to sit still.  I can press ALT+F4 and the fade
> and hourglass will go away as if nothing ever happened.  I'm forced to use
> CTRL+ALT+DEL and select either Logoff or Shut Down.  What could be causing
> that?  It doesn't seem to do that with local accounts.

I've never seen that behaviour, I'm afraid.

Martin
-- 
Martin Radford              |   "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ 
martin at zamenhof.demon.co.uk | men just upload their important stuff  -o)
Registered Linux user #9257 |  on ftp and let the rest of the world  /\\
- see http://counter.li.org |       mirror it ;)"  - Linus Torvalds _\_V