[Samba] what to do in worst case scenario: samba pdc not available

[Jean-Jacques Moulis]

On Thu, 12 Jan 2006 17:57:36 -0300 Martin Miethe <mmiethe at protourschile.com> wrote:

MM> Hi,
MM> 
MM> my question no really concerns 100% to Samba but since I use Samba ...
MM> I use Samba 3.0.13 as an PDC and have about 40 WinXp Pro Clients.
MM> I was wondering what happens if the WinXP Pro Clients won´t have any 
MM> connection to the Samba Server anymore. Maybye due an error in the 
MM> network or the PDC died for some reason.
MM> Is there any way to quickly change the clients profile to a local 
MM> profile? I don´t have profile roaming enabled. All I want is that the 
MM> users can access/login to their profiles if the Samba PDC wouldnt be 
MM> available anymore ....
MM> Thanks a lot
MM> regards,


In a typical office environment with XP default settings you don't
need to do a thing even with roaming profiles, without is only better.
It works, so to say, out of the box.

In an environment where people use differents workstations almost
everytime, where local copies of roaming profiles are deleted at logoff 
or  folder redirection to the PDC is used
the only viable solution is to fix the PDC A.S.A.P. or even faster


Expert from MS docs:

Interactive Logon: Number of previous logons to cache (in case a domain
controller is not available).

 Windows 2000 Server and Windows XP Professional store previous user logon
information locally so that a subsequent user can log on even if a domain
controller is unavailable. This setting determines how many unique previous
logons are cached. If a domain controller is unavailable and a user’s logon
information is stored, the user is prompted by this message: “A domain
controller for your domain could not be contacted. You have been logged on
using cached account information. Changes to your profile since you last
logged on may not be available.” If a domain controller is unavailable and
a user’s logon information is not stored, the user is prompted by this
message: “The system cannot log you on now because the domain DOMAIN NAME
is not available.” In this policy setting, a value of 0 disables logon
storing. Any value above 50 stores only 50 logon attempts. The default
value is 10 logons.