[Samba] Laptop users as domain members; profiles

[Scott Werschke]

I would like to implement Samba as a PDC in our organization, but am wrestling with how to handle laptop users.

If I join them to the domain and give them a domain account, I will still need to allow them a local account so that they can logon on the road.  This means that they will have two distinct accounts and two distinct profiles.    I could initially make the two profiles identical by copying the existing profile to the domain profile or copying the existing profile to the default profile before the domain profile is created, but subsequent changes to the local profile would not be reflected in the domain profile and vice versa.   I anticipate that this could cause great headaches for users and administrators.  If a user created or edited documents, added e-mail contacts or messages in outlook express or outlook, etc. as a domain user while in the office, these changes would not be seen when they logged in on the road as a local user.  I am aware that I could have the users login on the road as domain users using cached credentials, but to my knowledge (and experiments seem to verify this) caching domain credentials is limited to the use of roaming profiles.  I would like to avoid what seem to me to be a lot of headaches with roaming profiles, i.e., potential loss of data, extensive logon time, etc.  Further, there appears to be a limit to the number of previous logons to cache - 50.  I don't have the power to limit the time of the trips our executives take or the number of times they are allowed to logon on the road.  

The best solution I can come up with now is to remap there My Documents folder, Oulook express store folder and Outlook .pst files for both accounts to locations outside of the profiles.  This is O.K. except the additional work in setting up the client, the potential that I have missed something critical that should be "non-exclusive" to the two profiles, and that I don't have anyway of forcing them to login to the domain when they are in the office.  They could accidentally or intentionally login as a local user in the office, and I would not be able to track usage in the office or utilize logon scripts.

I am aware that some organizations seem to have a policy of simply not adding laptops to the domain, but with Samba this would also prevent me from utilizing logon scripts.

Any ideas would be appreciated.