Sysvol replication

[Kev Latimer]

Thanks for the script (and apologies for the delay in the thanks!), your 
bash is definitely better than mine but I'll put it to use and see if 
there's anything I can do to improve or expand on it.  I like your 
approach and it might be a good fit for me (I don't have a huge domain 
and a limited number of admins).  Thinking aloud, I may do a 
mix-and-match, perhaps using NFS on intra-site DC's and rsync 
"beachhead" DC's into the remote staging directory to keep the number of 
potentially unique sysvol entries to a minimum.

Thaks for your reply Matthieu, much appreciated.

On 19/04/2012 18:22, Matthieu Patou wrote:
> Hello Kev,
>
> On 04/19/2012 04:07 AM, Kev Latimer wrote:
>> Just wondering what the current best practice is for sysvol 
>> replication across Samba4 DC's?
>>
> So my recommendation is to use rsync and csync, with a staging directory.
>
> What I do is that on a given DC I rsync all other DC sysvol in the 
> staging directory, and then from the staging to the real sysvol 
> directory with csync.
>
> The reason for using rsync is that it copies the file and the exended 
> attributes and that very important as Samba DC stores NTACLs in 
> extended attribute (mostly), but in my tries it was not doing a great 
> job doing the 2 way sync and keeping the "latest version" of the file.
> I found csync being quite good at this, that why the sync between the 
> staging and the live directory is done with csync.
>
>> If there is no best practice, what do other people do to ensure 
>> sysvol is replicated properly across their samba DC's?
>>
>> My first thought was a cron'ed rsync, but I'm not sure how that would 
>> deal with the xattr's when it made it to the other DC's and there is 
>> always the potential for it to be out of date should it be updated on 
>> multiple GPO's.
>>
>> From the other end of the spectrum, I thought about designating one 
>> DC (the first DC in the domain) to have the "master" sysvol and 
>> exporting it via. NFS but again, not sure how this would get along 
>> with xattr.
>>
>> What does everyone else do?  I've done a little googling but the 
>> limited useful results I've found have generally been from a number 
>> of years ago and figure with the fast-moving target that is Samba4, 
>> it might be good to get an up-to-date set of ideas on this.
>>
> I have a script but it definitely need rewrite to make it really 
> useful, I don't have time to work on this right now I just attached a 
> cleaned version that should work if you adapt the paths.
>
> This script has still a massive issue that it expect UID and GID to be 
> the same which is not always the case, I think it's possible to 
> overcome the issue but it hasn't been done so far.
>
> Matthieu.
>


-- 
Kev