Samba caching directory handles? (Writes to incorrect home dir)

[James Sutherland]

On Tue, 15 May 2001, Gerald Carter wrote:
> On Tue, 15 May 2001, James Sutherland wrote:
>
> > Yep: the problem arises when \\server\homes is suddenly a different share
> > under the same name. Change the name as well - by using
> > \\server\%USERNAME% - and it's fine. That's how MS do it...
>
> So we can start to phase out homes and tell people to define a share
> called [%u].  There is one problem with this though.  Windows 9x clients
> do not have %USERNAME%.  Can we get around this via 'net use h: /home'?
> We need this type of generic support for logon scripts.

That will work fine when you are logged in to that domain; there's a
problem where you are only using this Samba system as a fileserver, rather
than for your "home login". The easiest example I can think of for this is
where a WWW server runs Samba so users can update their WWW pages: your
home directory on that WWW server is NOT your home directory, so "net use
\\www\homes" will NOT be the same as "net use /home"...

It looks as if DFS might offer us a way out here after all, though: for
sites depending on \\server\homes, just make sure the clients are all
Win98 or Win95 with the update, and we can use a DFS redirection.

Fall back to the current behaviour for pre-Win95 clients, which don't have
this problem but won't work with a DFS redirect?? Is it worth the effort -
how many sites depend on \\server\homes AND have pre-DFS clients? Probably
not many.....

A DFS redirect is probably a better solution than just dropping support,
anyway, I think?


James.
-- 
"Our attitude with TCP/IP is, `Hey, we'll do it, but don't make a big
system, because we can't fix it if it breaks -- nobody can.'"

"TCP/IP is OK if you've got a little informal club, and it doesn't make
any difference if it takes a while to fix it."
		-- Ken Olson, in Digital News, 1988