Adding a feature to the smbd

[jas88 at cam.ac.uk]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2001, [iso-8859-1] Thomas Lang=E5s wrote:

> Simo Sorce:
> > Yes, I've forgotten to say "if you have not too much IPs" ;)
> > I've also been employed in such a network (in an Italian university) an=
d
> > it is not so enjoyable to have hundreds of symlinks.
>
> No, it isn't :-)
>
> > Another way I'm thinking of is to have a different samba configuration =
for
> > every lab maybe using netbios aliases, this way every lab may have it's
> > own shares and profiles. But this really depend on your configuration a=
nd,
> > may be, not suitable.
>
> We're gonna use this patch for profile shares, and we have a central
> userdatabase with _all_ students (roughly 20000) and _all_ employees (don=
't
> know the exact number there), and we set the profile-directory there as
> something like:
> \\%profileserver%\%profileshare%\%U%\%profiletype%
>
> Then, this is set on each client computer. And now, that we're having
> profiles over samba this becomes:
> \\sambaservers\%profileshare%\%U%\%profiletype%
>
> So up untill now, we've been doing this like this:
> \\sambaservers\profilxxx\%U%\%profiletype%
>
> Where profilxxx was for each lab. This isn't actually a very good solutio=
n
> since we need to maintain a lot of shares. This is when I thought of givi=
ng
> samba the ability of a dynamic-share, which resulted in the patch. So aft=
er
> the weekend we're gonna start using this:
>
> \\sambaservers\profiles\%U%\%profiletype%
>
> Where the [profiles]-share will be a dynamic share.

Hrmm...

What are the DNS entries like for these machines? If they are something
like "machine17.lab3.foo", how about putting a DNS entry for
"profiles.lab3.foo" pointing to a suitable IP address (i.e. that with an
smbd sharing profiles for that lab on)? Then just use \\profiles\... as
the profile dir path. This should then resolve to profiles.lab3.foo,
profiles.lab4.foo or whatever, depending on the machine's DNS entry.


James.