problem saving roaming profile

[Hitesh Talati]

I think, I have resolved the problem and it sure is a WIN2K problem.

Just as I has said earlier, although we do run several samba servers in our
domain, the PDC still is NT4. The major difference in NT and WIN2K in terms
of storing profiles is that in NT its under WINNT\Profiles\%username% and
under WIN2K it is under "Documents and Settings/%username%". So, when a user
with a roaming profile logs onto an NT machine, everything works fine but
when he logs on WIN2K terminal server, it creates his default profile under
"D & S" folder and I think it tries to copy the profile with this new path
back on to the shared profile path  which is actually
\\servername\profiles\%username%. This gives a msg of access denied. (This
is strange as the message shuold say path not found or something like that).
I can reproduce this as many times as you want. Because this only happens if
its a fresh install of WIN2K. This does not happen if an NT4 is upgraded to
WIN2K as the profiles are preserved in the original location during an
upgrade.

The solution which has worked here for me is that instead of sharing the
profiles folder, I went ahead and shared the user's actual folder which
contains his profile. i.e let's say if the user's name is john, I shared the
folder 'john' instead of \profiles which contains a folder john. So that the
roaming profile path for john is now \\servername\john instead of
\\servername\profiles\john. This works perfectly fine for me whether a user
uses an NT, samba or WIN2K. I have tested this very well and the profiles
are uploaded and downloaded with all the changes made during a session
without giving any error messages.

Pls let me know if any of you has a different opinion or has found anything
else.

rgds
Hitesh


-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Thomas [mailto:mthomas at rhrk.uni-kl.de]
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2001 10:34 AM
To: Gerald Carter; Oliver Heering
Cc: Hitesh Talati; samba-ntdom at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: Re[2]: problem saving roaming profile



This may be a small hint to find a solution:
some directorys in the profile on the windows machines have the
dos 'read only' attribute set. Samba does not map this attribute
correct, at least here (windows 2ksp1 clients/german, samba 2.2 cvs
from May,3 2001, linux suse 6.3 with updated kernel 2.4.4 but without
acl-patch).
Since samba seems to ignore the 'read only' and sets the directory mode
to rwx insteat of r-x during profile upload to the samba server.
Windows may be 'confused' by this, since the downloaded profile directory
has the 'read only' attribute not set, because of the rwx mode of the
directory

To reproduce this:
- login to w2k, download profile
- open a document on a network share in word or excel, windows caches
 the path as a shortcut in the 'network neighbourhood', in the windows
 file-system this shortcut is a directory in the folder:
 c:\Dokumente und Einstellungen\<username>\netzwerkumgebung\<share> auf
<server>
 (i try to translate: c:\Documents and settings\<username>\network
neighbourhood\<share> on <server>)
- this directory has the 'dos read only' attribute set, which marks the
directory as a shortcut in this
 case (the attribute might have another meaning in other folders)
- logoff from the client, profile is uploaded to the server
- login the unix-box, change to the profile-share directory for the user and
see that the directory-mode
 for the 'shortcut'-directory is rwx for the owner and not r-x (directory
mode in smb.conf is 770)
- login on the client again with profile download, open 'network
neighbourhood' and see that the
 shortcut now is a 'normal directory' (dos read only not set) there is a
file target in this directory which points
 to the right place/the network share), set the dos-read-only attribute
manualy with right-click properties
 and see that the it act like a normal shortcut again.
- log off and realize that the directory in the stored profile has mode rwx
again instead of r-x

Hope this points to a right solution, at least it's a little bug report for
the described situation
Greetings,
Martin



----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerald Carter" <gcarter at valinux.com>
To: "Oliver Heering" <Heering at edo.uni-dortmund.de>
Cc: "Hitesh Talati" <htalati at torrentnet.com>; <samba-ntdom at lists.samba.org>
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2001 3:15 PM
Subject: Re: Re[2]: problem saving roaming profile


> On Mon, 7 May 2001, Oliver Heering wrote:
>
> > Some guy in the samba-ntdom mailinglist said, this bug has been fixed
> > in the CVS tree, but it actually hasn't. :( (i tried it out)
>
> Well technically, I can no longer reproduce it here. :-)
> If those who are having problems will provide some extra details of their
> environment (apologies if you have alreayd done this, but this is the
> last message in this thread i can find in my inbox), we get it corrected.
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Cheers, jerry
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>    /\  Gerald (Jerry) Carter                     Professional Services
>  \/    http://www.valinux.com/  VA Linux Systems   gcarter at valinux.com
>        http://www.samba.org/       SAMBA Team          jerry at samba.org
>        http://www.plainjoe.org/                     jerry at plainjoe.org
>
>        "...a hundred billion castaways looking for a home."
>                                 - Sting "Message in a Bottle" ( 1979 )
>
>
>