[Samba] does samba support non-flat /home

[john]

Hi all,

I hope this is an easy one:

We've just set up a samba server and We're using winbind with the
idmap_rid backend option to authenticate users via AD. So far so good!
Now we want window users to have there home shares on the samba
server.

When Winbind pulls a list of users from AD it appears to use the
template homedir option in our smb.conf to figure out where users home
directories should be located (Am I wrong about this?) This
relationship seems to get "hard coded" into the idmap.

My question is can the smb.conf Global Option "template homedir =" be
used to allow users to log in to their home dir if /home isn't flat?
Is there another way to do this?

We have about 1500 hundred kids whose home directories should look
like /home/graduationYear/studentName

So student a's home directory should look like:
 /home/2008/astudent

and student b's  might be:
 /home/2009/bstudent

Would it be better to just leave out template homedir, remove the
tdb's and rebind to windows? What would SAMBA's process be to map
windows users to unix home directories then?

Perhaps the real solution is to create shares like this:

[2007]
      path = /home/students/2007
      valid users = %S
      readonly = no
      writable = yes
      printable = no
      create mode = 0600
      directory mode = 0600


[2008]
      path = /home/students/2008
      valid users = %S
      readonly = no
      writable = yes
      printable = no
      create mode = 0600
      directory mode = 0600

Any advice would be appreciated!

Thanks!

John