Adding a feature to the smbd

[Richard Sharpe]

At 06:23 PM 1/21/01 +0100, Thomas Langås 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) and
                                                
>> 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
and,                                               
>> 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 solution
>since we need to maintain a lot of shares. This is when I thought of giving
>samba the ability of a dynamic-share, which resulted in the patch. So after
>the weekend we're gonna start using this:
>
>\\sambaservers\profiles\%U%\%profiletype%
>
>Where the [profiles]-share will be a dynamic share.

OK, now I understand ... This can actually be done with existing facilities
in Samba, in a two step process.

In [profiles] you can use environment variables in the path:

  [profiles]
    path = /some/path/%$(PROFILE_PATH)

You set up a file in a root exec for the netlogon share, as you are
probably logging on ... and then you use the 'source environment' parameter
before the path parameter in your [profiles] share to read the environment
variable.

If you want more info on using environment variables in macros, have a look
at Special Edition, Using Samba.

>-- 
>-Thomas
>
>

Regards
-------
Richard Sharpe, sharpe at ns.aus.com
Samba (Team member, www.samba.org), Ethereal (Team member, www.zing.org)
Contributing author, SAMS Teach Yourself Samba in 24 Hours
Author, Special Edition, Using Samba