Migrating from Samba 2.2.8A PDC -> Samba 3.0 PDC

[John H Terpstra]

On Wed, 22 Oct 2003, Yashpal Nagar wrote:

> Dear Samba team,
>
>    In my last organistaion i used to run PDC on samba 2.2.5a IIRC. My
> biggest problem was the user profiles,
> All the profiles+ desktop icons+ My doc etc used to sit on PDC server.
> Sometimes our users were having profiles as big as 250 MB due to their
> personnel files, mp3 etc on desktop. It increased the logon time to several
> minutes. which was really hectic.:((

Read the Samba-HOWTO-Collection.pdf that ships with Samba-3. There is a
chapter on policy management and one on desktop profiles. In there you
will find the registry keys that must be manipulated so that folders like
"My Documents" can be stored on a network share. This manipulation of
registry keys can be done using an NTConfig.POL file that is stored on the
NETLOGON share.

Use of Roaming Profiles without such provisions is the root cause of the
bad experience people on this list have reported. It is definitely NOT
advisable to operate with large profile capacities such as what you are
attempting to do. I have seen desktop profiles as large as 1.5GB! Transfer
of profiles that large over a 100Mb/s network is close to insanity. The
Samba-HOWTO-Collection.pdf provides information that allows you to take
control.

The solution to long profile load times is NOT to disable roaming
profiles. You realise, of course, that by disabling roaming profiles
critical user data will end up being stored on the workstation where it
will not be backed up!

>
> When i tried to disable the profile logon path = \\%L\Profiles\%U problem i
> faced that user complain that there desktop settings , background etc were
> lost.

Of course!

> Can someone suggest me that Profiles etc remain on the local m/c itself,
> without lossing any settings even after reboot , and authentication +
> respective home dir mapped to clients.

See above comments. Read the documentation. If it is not clear, or you can
not understand it, tell me. I want to make certain that the documentation
is useful and helpful. Please tell me what problems you have that are not
sufficiently addressed in the documentation so I can fix it.

> Please help!!

You can get control of your windows network environment only by using
policies to control what users can do on their deaktops, and by using
appropriate profile configurations. MS Windows does NOT do that
automatically in any network configuration - you need to be proactive
about it.

>
> Warm regards,
> -Yash
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "ODC" <odc-public at hotpop.com>
> To: "John H Terpstra" <jht at samba.org>
> Cc: <samba-technical at lists.samba.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 2:23 PM
> Subject: Re: Migrating from Samba 2.2.8A PDC -> Samba 3.0 PDC
>
>
> > John H Terpstra wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, 21 Oct 2003, ODC wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > >>Hi,
> > >>
> > >>I run a Samba 2.2.8a PDC, and I had thought that Samba 3.0 would be a
> > >>seamless drop-in upgrade for my system.  Apparantly it isn't.
> > >
> > >
> > > What conclusions did you draw from chapter 30 of the
> > > Samba-HOWTO-Collection.pdf? What guidance were you looking for that is
> not
> > > provided?
> >
> > Thanks for responding John.
> >
> > I hadn't had the time to play with it more, and I hadn't stumbled on
> > that documentation (I originally thought it was the pre-3.0 HOWTO).
> >
> > I had to revert back to 2.2.8 as I needed the domain to be active again,
> > I will try again when I have some more time in the next few days and
> > report back to the list.
> >
> > It may just be a PEBCAK problem.
> >
> > Sorry for the hasty response.
> >
>

-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org