[Samba] many servers and mobile users - "always use the most fresh user profile" - ideas?

[Robert Schetterer]

Hi Bob,
the normal setup would be a bdc in other locations,
and setup users profiles in their home offices,
if they have only short terms of visit in other offices they must life 
with longer logon time, if they stay lets say longer than two week than 
move their profiles and homes to the other bdc, so its done in very 
large ( 10000 users ) windows networks ,i know.
this is can very easy be done with ldap and samba.
I dont think rsync profiles will be a satisfactory solution, cause
users can also comming from vpn adsl/wlan etc so the profile are never 
in sync int that case ( ie if they work in hotels at night etc ) in my 
cenarios.
choose a good vpn connect 2 MB synchron with openvpn was enough for me 
with 100 users 90% sitting in their home offices 10 % traveling around.
I had limited the profiles to 30 MB maximum, so even in the worst case 
in ca. 3 minutes they got their profile staying in any kind of office net.
This stuff deeply depends on the conection limits, so i.e i know 
companies they have black fiber lines  in usa , europe, asia , but isdn 
in africa and have to sync more than just profiles, i.e exchange data etc.
so the have bdc in africa office ( with good connect ) so they syncing
with europe every hour , from there africa office b wich has only isdn 
is synced further only in night.
after all have this global network a full working time service across
the networks is needed, just a lot what admins much think of at syncing 
any data.
Best Regards

Gautier, B (Bob) schrieb:
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: samba-bounces+bob.gautier=rabobank.com at lists.samba.org 
>> [mailto:samba-bounces+bob.gautier=rabobank.com at lists.samba.org
>> ] On Behalf Of Tomasz Chmielewski
>> Sent: 10 March 2006 14:14
>> To: samba
>> Subject: [Samba] many servers and mobile users - "always use 
>> the most fresh user profile" - ideas?
>>
>> I have a situation like below:
>>
>> Samba servers in many cities; one "backup" server in the 
>> central location that fetches user profiles each night 
>> (changes really with rsync).
>>
>> Users work in many locations; sometimes one user can work in 
>> city A, and a day later he can work in city B.
>>
>>
>> This means that they have problems with their profiles - user profile 
>> for city A will be different from his profile in city B.
>>
>>
>> Using the central server for storing all profiles is not a 
>> good solution 
>> - it would take too long to fetch/upload user profile over WAN/VPN.
>> Pulling the profile from the central server should only happen if the 
>> local profile is older.
>>
>>
>> I tried using preexec, to launch a script which would compare 
>> the local 
>> and "remote" profile, and pull the newest version from the central 
>> server if necessary.
>>
>> However, Windows logon times outs after 2 minutes, and 
>> usually it takes 
>> longer to download the profile.
>>
>>
>> Has anyone ever dealt with the situation where users work in multiple 
>> locations, but would like to have the profiles the same?
>>
>>
>> I know it can be done easily with Windows 2003 R2, what about Samba?
> 
> About a year ago I worked out an architecture in which rsync would be
> used to replicate profiles from location to location (replication being
> triggered by *logout*, not *login*) but it never got anywhere near
> implementation as far as I am aware.  You just have to make sure you
> have enough bandwidth so you can move the profiles faster than the
> people. :-)  Of course rsync helps quite a bit.
> 
> Bob Gautier
> 
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Tomasz Chmielewski
>> -- 
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