Fwd: [Samba] Reality Check -> Roaming Profiles

[Eric Lester]

Hmm. Guess I'll try sending this to the right list now.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Eric Lester <eflester at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2004 21:46:13 -0800
Subject: Re: [Samba] Reality Check -> Roaming Profiles
To: taclug mailing list <taclug-general at taclug.org>


What I've found useful by way of compromise is to use a logon script
to map a drive to the user's share on the Samba server.  On the client
desktop I point "My Documents" at this drive and use gpedit to prevent
the user from changing this target.  This keeps users from saving to
the "My Documents" directory in Documents and Settings, which makes
the profile pretty heavy.

Theoretically, you could make the desktop "read only," though I
haven't done that. Yet.

Furthermore, I set the browser cache limit to 20MB.  This is also
lockable with the Group Policy editor.

And -- Thanks be to Zeus or whoever -- we don't use Outlook.  Yet,
anyway.  If there's gonna be Outlook, though, you can point it to
another place on the network (or local drive) to store the .pst.
Those buggers can get very big.  Or, if you have a lot of Outlook
junkies, you can run something like Open Exchange and put all that
drek on a database server.

With these arrangements I've had a minimal amount of trouble. So far.




On Wed, 8 Dec 2004 21:18:50 -0800, Matthew Easton <info at sublunar.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday 08 December 2004 18:19, Alex Satrapa wrote:
> > On 9 Dec 2004, at 12:07, Michael Lueck wrote:
>
> >
> > The main disadvantage of the Microsoft Windows approach is the
> > bandwidth wasted while people log in and out.
>
> In my experience, samba networks also have more problem with profiles becoming
> corrupted and not being able to copy down from the server or back up to it.
> I surmise it is differences in Win32 and Linux with respect to permitted
> characters and/or path length.
>
> > Both methods "need to be fixed" IMHO - a fair middle ground would be to
> > mark some portions of the "profile" as "volatile" (and thus they won't
> > be copied back to the central store on logout),
> Windows and samba already do this -- you have an invisible "Local Settings"
> file in your Roaming profile where, for example, Outlook stores its .pst
> files.  It doesn't get copied up to the server.  Of course, I'd much rather
> email did get copied to the server -- leave the web browser cache behind
> instead.
>
> > and the actual copying
> > back and forth of non-volatile (I'm not going to use the word
> > "permanent") data should use an optimised copy - something like rsync,
> > which will only copy the changes.
>
> That would certainly be an improvement.
>
>
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--
 All men are frauds.  The only difference between them is that some
admit it.  I myself deny it.
-- H. L. Mencken


-- 
 All men are frauds.  The only difference between them is that some
admit it.  I myself deny it.
-- H. L. Mencken