[Samba] Samba PDC - LDAP - Roaming profiles - Win XP - Offline Files - Slow - High Load

[Daniel Zeiss]

Dear All,

my Samba installation (see below) is

*  _very slow_ during logon from a Win XP Workstation,

* one Workstation produces a _high load_ of 97% on the server for ~10 
secs on a P4 2.4Ghz 512MB RAM system

* makes it impossible to use _redirected folders_, because stupid 
Offline Files and syncronisation kicks in.

Can you help me?


Now to the _details_:

I am running Samba 2.2.8a on a Debian Woody server (P4 2.4 Ghz, 512MB 
RAM, IDE RAID) which uses OpenLDAP 2.0.23 as database backend. All on a 
switched FastEthernet.

User login (encrypted passwords), adding workstation to domain, normal 
file sharing, getting Default Profile for new users, running logon 
script works all great, but

during login of a user to a Workstation the process is very slow. The 
default profile which gets copied is just 8MB, so its not data transfer 
which is slowing it down.
Also when a users logs in on the samba server the load rises to 97%. 
This is just on a setup with one server and one workstation. I am 
planning of deploying 60 clients which will apparently not work with 
this setup.

I have now clue on how to trace the problem. Can you help?

Third problem is with the roaming profiles. The profiles itself work 
great, just I wish to redirect the Personal folder. I read the HowTo on 
the SambaDocuWebpage finding the UserShellFolder directive. I did a 
NTConfig.POL file with poledit.exe setting this folder to 
%LOGONSERVER%\%USERNAME% and also setting some permission stuff.
The file gets read because the permission stuff is done and the Personal 
Folder is redirected to the users homedrive on the samba server, BUT 
this activates the OfflineFiles mode of WinXP and WinXP tries to 
syncronize the files on users logoff.
I found a way to prevent this by setting in some NetCache registry 
values the "Enabled" switch to 0, so the syncronisation doesnt take 
place but still the Personal Folder will carry the symbol of a folder 
were syncronisation is enabled. Also WinXP seems to transfer constant 
data with the samba server which increases network and cpu load.

Is there a better way of doing it?
Is there a better way of doing policies than poledit.exe?

On sambaXP many people spoke about the new Samba Howto. Which one is it? 
Is it already released?

Thank you in advance

Daniel

P.S.: Do I see it correctly that the GPO on a Win2000/XP ADS setup are 
just specific NTConfig.POL files applied to a special workstation or 
group of workstations?