[Samba] Profile Location Best Practice

[deann corum]

Eric J. Feldhusen wrote:
> 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.
>
>   
Wasn't it the case a while back that if there were older clients on the 
network (Win95-Win98, etc.) that the Samba profile HAD to be inside the 
home directory?  Probably many Samba installations still have them there 
from those days if they've been using Samba long enough, and IF that was 
the case.  (?)

Would having the profiles inside the home directory also cause slow 
logins, by chance with roaming profiles? We have issues with that EVEN 
when the roaming profiles are *not* large. 

Also, regarding where profiles should be stored, I wrote to this list a 
while back (5/17/07) regarding an Office 2007 read-only issue that was 
fixed by setting "profile acls = no" on the user's home directory. Well, 
it fixed the Office 2007 read-only problem but *broke* the roaming 
profiles.  Is the ONLY solution to this issue likely to be moving our 
hundreds of Samba profiles scattered across many servers into seperate 
directories?  OR, can/should this particular item be considered a Samba 
bug?

Thanks,

-- 
Deann Corum