[Samba] Profile Location Best Practice

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> >> 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.  (?)
> > I am not aware of any documentation that said that the Win9X profile HAD to be 
> > stored in the users' home directory.  I'd appreciate a pointer to where this 
> > is stated so ti can be fixed.
> >> 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?

Sounds to be like you have answered your own question;  do *not* put
profiles in user's home directories.   The 'default' behavior for
windows is to not store user's profiles in any share the user explicitly
maps, so don't do that.  The user shouldn't be diddling around in their
profile folders so putting them somewhere the user is going to
inevitably diddle is a bad idea anyway.

> > How can it be a Samba bug, when it is the Windows client that can disconnect 
> > its connections to network shares before the profile has been written to the 
> > server?
> You misunderstand me. I was not referring to the disconnection issue but 
> rather another issue related to where roaming profiles are stored. 
> Please read the second paragraph above regarding Office 2007 read-only 
> issue. THAT is what I asked about.  Sorry if I confused you.
> Having the profile inside the users home directory (and apparently some 
> people *do* have Samba configured that way),  

Sure,  I've seen Samba configured in some pretty mind boggling ways.
That never implies that doing so is "right", "proper", "accepted", or
even "useful".

> When the profile is in the user's home directory and profile acls = yes 
> is set, Office 2007 will save files to the home directory as read-only, 
> causing the user to be unable to modify them after that. Setting profile 
> acls = no fixes that problem - but breaks the roaming profile. I asked 
> if the only solution to this is moving the roaming profiles out of home 
> directories in this case?

I'm willing to go on record with "Yes".  Change your configuration and
the problem goes away - indicates the problem was your configuration.

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams, Network & Systems Administrator
Consultant - http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com
Developer - http://www.opengroupware.org