[Samba] Windows 2000 Terminal Server and Samba

[Drew.Zeller at statcan.ca]

Hey Guys,

I saw your postings and thought I would through in my two cents for the
Windows 2000 Terminal Server and Samba.  The MultipleUsersOnConnection does
not seem to work in Windows 2000 version of Terminal Server (at least not
for me).  My understanding is that Microsoft has removed that option in
Windows 2000.  What I have found, through various discussions in the Samba
newsgroups, as well as testing, it is possible to give a unique SMB process
to Terminal Server SAMBA connection, however to do this they need to access
the samba server through an alias for the SAMBA server.  In my tests this
was tried with both the SAMBA netbios aliases option, as well as creating
server name aliases through the local hosts file on my Terminal server.  In
both cases, each connection to the server, with a different host name alias,
was found to create a new smb process for each alias name connection and
this in turn helped with my file server performance problems (as well as
some file locking problems).

What I have started to do is create a unique server alias for each user that
goes to access the server (this way each user gets their own unique SMB
process), and so far no problems.  I have implemented this by creating a
SAMBA server host name alias in my Terminal server hosts file using the
users user id (this way the user id is not visible to anyone off of that
terminal server).  

Something to be aware of though is that in my case the most aliases I have
had to create at anyone time is around 50, so I do not know what the maximum
number of aliases possible would be (for either the netbios aliases option
or the local hosts file) so this may not be do-able in a large environment.
Also, in my case, user's normally only access files from one SAMBA server so
the user id aliases can work for me.  If someone needs to access another
server they just access it through the regular NetBIOS name, but since this
does not happen too often, it does not create noticeable performance
problems for my users (or at least none have been reported or noticed).

Hope this helps.