Win95 clients not logging in to Samba

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, 26 Aug 1997, Louis Mandelstam wrote:

> On Tue, 26 Aug 1997, Luke Leighton wrote:
> 
> > right - we understand what's going on, and the bottom line is, you 
> > can't use the [homes] share at the moment to store profiles.  it _has_ 
> > to be the share _generated_ from the [homes] share.
> 
> When I started moving a site's (Win95 based) users over from the old
> outgoing Netware server to a machine running Samba, I soon changed from
> using [homes] at all, to making a [homedir] share as follows:
> 
> [homedir]
>    comment = Your home directory
>    path = /home/%u
>    browseable = yes
>    read only = no
>    create mask = 0770
> 
> I realize that not everyone has the luxury of having all their users'
> home directories in the same place...  Shame, poor you ;-) - symlinks?
> 
> Anyway, this enabled me to do all kinds of nifty things like hardcode
> their word processors to expect their documents in \\sacc2\homedir and I

i know - it's a hell of a lot better: i configured some netscape 4.02 
communicator shortcuts to start up in \\cb1-gw\homes\netscape; configured 
_one_ profile called "defaultuser", which stored its data (again) in 
\\cb1-gw\homes\netscape, and then copied this across a hundred accounts.

easy.  i _like_ the principle behind homes and homedir.

> soon decided I liked this home dir approach better than the special
> [homes] support in Samba.  I've no clue if the [homes] way of doing things
> in standard in the NT world.

nope!  not a hope in hell of it being standard, which is why we have this 
problem now.

ok.  the [homes] share, as jeremy explained it to me, is treated as a 
special case.  any access to the [homes] share is _redirected_ to the 
[%U] share created for that purpose.  therefore, jeremy cannot test a 
simple fix that he wanted to apply, and has some more thinking to do 
about this.

however, _your_ approach, namely to manually create something similar to 
the [homes] share, might be a way to sort this.  oh, hang on, wait a 
minute: actually, it might be a problem.

the smbd process setuids to root when the user logs off.  it doesn't die, 
because the background logon process under NT may still have files open.  
then, your 2nd user logs on.  and the path suddenly changes under the NT 
machine's feet.  it may attempt to close files whose path has changed.

good idea: not good for storing profiles, though.

> So, my question - with the above setup, I should not having problems
> putting the user profiles into their home directories as well?

 
> Do system policies go into netlogon I presume?

yes, they do.  although i am informed that you need to manually configure 
the w95 machine (some obscure registry setting: if you find it, please 
let us know: i will be looking too!) to _use_ the config.pol file.  i 
have been told about the configuration of NT workstation to get it to use 
NTconfig.pol, although because we can't do NT domain logons, this is not 
useful :-(

regards,

luke