[Samba] Profile Location Best Practice

[deann corum]

Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
>>>> 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.
>
>   
Not really. I asked if that was the ONLY solution. It likely isn't, but 
it is the only one *possible* at this time. It appears that the default 
config of Samba when first installed according to other posts here, same 
subject, is to put the profiles in the user's home directory in 
smb.conf.  If that is so, maybe that ought to be changed as it is 
apparently misleading to Samba users - regardless what the docs say.

It also appears that a few people are possibly misled by a belief that 
older versions of Windows (See Server Gremlin original post) may have 
required just such a configuration. In the environment I'm in, for 
instance I inherited this config and was also told that it was due to 
older versions of Windows clients requiring it.  While the documentation 
may not state that anywhere, that doesn't mean it *wasn't* the case (or 
that it was). 

Documentation can't possibly cover all assumptions erroneous or 
otherwise, but default configs when Samba is loaded can endeavor to 
follow whatever the 'best practice' might be and if that is to place 
profiles in a separate share than home directories, and that is not how 
a  fresh install is configured, maybe that should be changed?  Just a 
suggestion.

Anyway, thanks for answering this question.

D