[Samba] Re: incompatibility between roaming profiles and winxp clients that didn't create them

[David Hostetler]

Eric,

thanks for the reply.  I've been experimenting with the profiles all day 
and discovered a few things, but nothing that really solves the problem.

I did try the UHPC tool that you mentioned.  Interestingly I did in fact 
have a whole slew of event logs of exactly the kind mentioned in the 
UHPC readme, but installing the service doesn't seem to have had any 
effect on the incompatible profile problem.  I also played around with 
more of the profile-related options in gpedit.msc (like 'wait for remote 
user profile', and 'always wait for the network at computer startup and 
logon'.  These also don't seem to have had any effect (positive or 
negative).

I discovered that it doesn't seem to be the profile files themselves 
that are the problem.  I did the following (for a particular user):

1) change the profile type to 'local' for a particular user
2) manually replace the local profile folder (which gets created after 
step 1) with the PDC's profile directory for the user
3) login as the user

The profile gets loaded without complaint, and everything seems to work 
normally.  It seemed to work going in either direction as well - that 
is, getting a new winxp client to load an old profile and an old winxp 
client to load a new profile.

However, while I'm able to login on any client, and the profile seems to 
get loaded (and windows claims the profile is of type 'roaming' and 
status 'roaming'), changes to the user's environment/desktop don't seem 
to transfer to/from the roaming profile, for either new or old clients. 
  They both seem to be just happily loading the 'cached' local copy.  I 
don't know if that's actually what's happening - especially since I 
enabled stuff in gpedit.msc that should raise some kind of alarm if 
windows isn't communicating successfully with the PDC (and defaulting 
back to the cached local profile).

The step that seems to be reliably screwing up is when winxp tries to 
create the local cached profile -- even if it's caching a roaming 
profile that it specifically created (i.e. the client trying to cache it 
locally is the same client that only moments before wrote the profile to 
an empty profile folder on the PDC).

Sorry to be so wordy again, but I just want to leave a trail of what I'm 
seeing, in case someone strolls by who has the elusive tiny piece of 
knowledge that will solve this.

cheers,

David Hostetler



Eric J. Feldhusen wrote:
> David Hostetler wrote:
>> Basically, winxp seems to be creating roaming profiles that are 
>> incompatible with another winxp client.
> 
> This doesn't help, but since either the November Microsoft "Patch 
> Tuesday" we've seen the exact same thing across 19 different Samba PDC's 
> running RHES4 with Samba 3.0.10.  In some of the forums I've been 
> reading, I've seen the same problem mentioned, but by people running 
> Windows 2k3 server, so I don't think it's a Samba/Windows 2k3 PDC/AD 
> issue, I suspect it's a client-side problem introduced from some update.
> 
> I've been searching for a solution, but I haven't found one yet.  It's 
> not a fix, but it has helped some of our machines to install the User 
> Hive Profile Cleanup Service.  On some machines, it has fixed the 
> problem, other machines, not.
> 
> http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1B286E6D-8912-4E18-B570-42470E2F3582&displaylang=en 
> 
> 
> I don't have hard numbers, but every "Patch Tuesday" since November, 
> we've seen additional machines having the same problems, either 
> wednesday, thursday or friday, after updating.
> 
> Eric Feldhusen
> 
>