[Samba] Profile Location Best Practice

[Eric J. Feldhusen]

Charles Marcus wrote:
>> The key advantage is that if the profile is stored within the user's
>> home directory, the Windows workstations will sometimes discconnect the
>> user's home directory network drive mapping during logout before the
>> profile has finished synchronizing between the workstation and the
>> server, and your users may have broken profile problems.
> 
> Wow... maybe this explains the mysterious problems I've been having...
> 
> Currently, user profiles are stored in:
> 
> \\server\home\user\system\profile
> 
> system is a hidden folder in the users home dir, so they don't even
> 'see' it (unless they enable 'Show hidden files and folders').
> 
> Home folder is mapped to H:, target = \\server\home\user
> 
> 'My Documents' folder is mapped to H:
> 
> It has worked very well - with the OCCASIONAL exception of mysterious
> problems with deleted icons from the desktop reappearing, and OCCASIONAL
> corrupted files in the users profile
> 
> Are you saying that this could be causing these problems? I thought it
> would be ok, since the Profile path is an UNC path, not a mapped drive
> letter?

That is what I used to think as well, but after 5+ years of Samba
experience on about 19-20 Linux servers, a lot of reading of the Samba
Official How-to and Official By-Example and samba email lists, my
experience is that a separate profile share not under the user's home
directory works best.

>From the Samba Official How-to, check out the "Note" section just a few
paragraphs down from the top of this link that explains why a separate
profile share

http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/ProfileMgmt.html#id418314

Also, I can't recommend the Samba Official How-to and Official
By-Example enough.  They both take time to read through, but each is
well written, easy to read, and real "glue" together understanding how
Samba and Windows clients interact.

Also, you can download the latest versions of each document from
http://www.samba.org ,but I've purchased one edition of each once to
support the authors, because both books are that good.

-- 
Eric Feldhusen
Network Administrator    http://www.remc1.org
eric at remc1.org
PO Box 270              (906) 482-4520  x239
809 Hecla St            (906) 482-5031 fax
Hancock, MI  49930      (906) 370 6202 mobile