[Samba] Question about USRMGR.EXE and user profiles.

[Arturo Limón]

Hello,

I am trying to find and easy way for end users to add Samba accounts to a
Linux server. Some of my end users are schoot teachers, and they have to add
tens of students to their Samba servers.

I have a running Linux with Samba, configured upon the directions of Samba-3
by example, chapter 3, "Secure Office Networking", this is Samba with
tdbsam, not LDAP.

I can create accounts in Linux following the step by step of creating a Unix
user account (useradd), Samba user account (smbpasswd -a) and creating
folder for profile in /var/lib/samba/profiles. Users created this way have a
roaming profile when logged in, get their home mapped as a letter (X:) as
indicated in smb.conf, and can browse the network environment.

I thought user accounts created with just name and password (no other
parameters added) by USRMGR would behave the same way, but they don't. When
logged in, such accounts do not have a roaming profile (only local) and it
cannot be changed; their home share get not mapped as a letter, and they
cannot browse the network environment.

I would like to know if this is a normal behaviour of USRMGR and Samba,
because I want my end users to be able to add users giving just name and
password from some tool in Win-XP, and not having to indicate user home,
profile path, and so on.

By the way, useradd in CentOS (Red-Hat) creates by default a private group
for every user; I do not want that when user accounts are created by Samba
scripts. I have tried to change smb.conf to add some of the switches useradd
allows to indicate a different user group (useradd .-n .... or useradd -g
users ....) but USRMGR refuses to create accounts when any of those switches
is on. Why?

¿Any other "just name and password" way to create Samba/Unix users with
tdbsam?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Arturo Limon