[Samba] PDC and BDC: how to sync profiles

[Andreas]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 03:41:44PM +0200, Robert Schetterer wrote:
> Having a bdc in another net i.e over vpn to another office
> so you give the profile and home path to that bdc in the ldap entries of 
> the users of this "remote" office.

Ok, that scenario is clear.

> The other part ist to have the bdc as a fallback to the pdc, there for 
> you have to make sure that

That is my scenario: BDCs around as a fallback and to alleviate the load
on the PDC for auth purposes.

> files , homes , profiles got in sync with the pdc ones.
> There are so many ways to  do this that i can describe...this is related 

The problem is that these methods are ony way: rsync from PDC to BDC or
vice-versa. Which means that, when using %L in the profile
specification, the user would either be using the PDC one or the BDC
one. rsync doesn't really work well here, since it's one-way. And NFS
gives me nightmares :) That's why I asked the list about what most
people would do in this scenario.

> how you wanna do this
> i.e rsync nfs copy  etc. and which fits best to your needs.
> It is a good idea speacialy in bigger networks hosting profiles and 
> homes not on the pdc/bdc
> and let them do only auth jobs. for hosting profiles and homes you might 
> use a nas server
> which has raid etc

I'm inclined to do that, not only to make sure xDCs only serve auth, but
because of the profile sync problem. If I place the profiles elsewhere
(in another server), the only problem I could have if that server went
down is the (temporary) loss of the profile. Users should be instructed
to not store important things there anyway (the profile has to be
small).