[Samba] Should samba be split between client & server

[Matt Skerritt]

On 30/01/2007, at 8:48 AM, Jason Baker wrote:

> I am just wondering what issues we will all face with the coming of  
> Windows Vista. Once I start purchasing client machines with Vista  
> pre-installed, how will this impact making that new machine a  
> member of a SAMBA controlled domain?

Well, since I insisted on buying all my Windows XP licenses with  
Software Assurance, I have gotten to download and use Vista free of  
charge. As such I did so and chose one of our laptops to be rebuilt  
with Vista and to be a test machine.

Vista joined my Samba NT domain without any issue at all. One thing I  
noticed is that Vista has a different profile to Windows XP. So for  
user joeblogs, windows XP goes looking for \\<servernamer> 
\<profileshare>\joeblogs, and windows Vista goes looking for (and  
creates if it is not there) \\<servernamer>\<profileshare> 
\joeblogs.V2.  I did not try saving a default profile as Default  
User.V2  and see if a new user got those defaults when their new  
profile was created :(.

However, the big gotcha I found, and the one that is going to stop me  
even thinking of testing vista as a serious desktop replacement for  
my machines here, is that it did not apply the system policies from \ 
\<servername>\netlogon\ntconfig.pol. I don't even know if it will do  
system policy. I have a gut feeling that once I get around to asking  
microsoft if I can use NT System Policies with Vista, they're going  
to tell me no, and to go get a windows server with group policy.  
Although I hope it's just something simple like having an  
ntconfig.pol.V2 or something (similar to the profiles). We'll see

Since then more important things have cropped up and I stopped  
experimenting. The laptop in question was rebuilt again, as a  
standalone machine (not on the domain) with Windows Vista still. The  
actual end users of the laptop have said they very much like the new  
windows and have found it easy to use. <shrug> It looked like an  
improvement to me, but nothing greatly different in terms of  
operation. Still, s'long as they're happy :)

--
Matt Skerritt
matt.skerritt at agrav.net