[Samba] Roaming profiles with Samba3

[himhim]

Hi,

Note to Roaming profile that it requires a stable and relatively fast 
connection to the server since it retrieve and synchronize quite a lot of 
stuff everytime you login or logout, unluckily our organization are separated 
in a few buildings and we're running over a wireless connection which couldn't 
afford this luxury :P

For the time-control of the opening share, i don't think samba itself provide 
this function but since it reloads smb.conf relatively fast every time it 
changes (i've read somewhere that it reloads it every 60secs if changes are 
made, and my personal testing shows it reloads much faster than this)

I would suggest you could simply use crontab and rotate different smb.conf 
from time to time, and samba would refresh itself with the new config without 
restarting the samba daemon. If you couldn't wait, you could use 'smbcontrol 
force-reload' to manually reload the smb.conf. And finally disconnect the 
share with 'smbcontrol smbd close-share [share-name]'

For drive disconnection it is not instant, i have no idea why, but there's 
some time between you fire the 'smbcontrol smbd close-share [share-name]' 
command and windows detecting the share is gone, the time gap is about 10 min 
at my scenario, but it is sufficient for my case because i don't actually need 
so fine-grained time-control, a few minutes delay on disconnection is 
acceptable.

For share activation, it is rather easy as once the smb.conf is changed, 
windows client could see that share almost instantly.

Anyone has better solution?

Cheers,
Him

(P.S. it looks that you have to issue 'smbcontrol [pid] close-share 
[share-name]' to all active smbd process, i tried 'smbcontrol smbd close-share 
[share-name]' but it isn't working as expected, but once i use a script to get 
the list of smbd process id and issue smbcontrol to everyone of them , the 
share successfully disconnects after a few minutes, i'm already happy with the 
outcome tho)




>===== Original Message From Jason Williams <jwilliams at courtesymortgage.com> 
=====
>Good morning everyone.
>
>I wanted to ask the people on this list who are currently using roaming
>profiles with samba 3 how it is working? I worked a little with roaming
>profiles with 2.2.8a, but it was not working as well as I wanted it to and
>im hoping that samba 3 roaming profiles are working pretty well.
>
>Our network here is really calling for roaming profiles to be a major
>option here. Our CEO wants the ability for users to be able to log into any
>terminal on the network with their username and password...roaming profiles
>is what im hoping to use here.
>
>Im setting up a test box here, but have not yet had time to test roaming
>profiles.
>WIth that in mind, anyone care to share how roaming profiles are working?
>Any tips or suggestions on ways to improve roaming profiles on my end?
>
>Lastly, is it possible to setup a hours of operations for shares on samba?
>For example, maybe you only want shares to be available during buisness
>hours and closed on the weekends. Is there a way to do that with samba, or
>would you need to use something like the poledit utility?
>
>I appreciate everyones feedback and help.
>
>Jason
>
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