[Samba] Samba 4 roaming profiles

Adam Tauno Williams awilliam at whitemice.org
Wed Dec 21 13:15:26 MST 2011


On Wed, 2011-12-21 at 18:53 +0100, steve wrote:
> Hi everyone
> This is our first proper test of Samba 4 and we've been up with an 
> opensuse server, an ubuntu client, an opensuse client and a win 7 
> client. 24 hours without a problem:)
> 1. We have got as far as deciding where roaming profiles should go. In 
> 3.6 we had them inside the users home folder. Someone said that was not 
> good. Going with the Samba 4 wiki, we put them in 
> /usr/local/samba/var/profiles and used the microsoft remote directory 
> tool to set everyone's profile to that folder. It worked well and the 
> permissions are set correctly too.
> Does it really matter where they are stored?

So long as it is somewhere that (a) has reasonable performance (b) gets
backed up and (c) user's are tempted to mess with them directly [which
is why home directory overlap is bad].

> 2, We used likewise to join the Linux boxes to the domain. The Linux 
> Desktop however seems to be stored locally by likewise. It is not 
> available as a windows roaming profile. e.g. creating a file on the 
> ubuntu desktop makes the file unavailable on either the opensuse or win 
> 7 client.

Yes.  I have no experience with Likewise, but this is the experience I
would expect.  It would only really work if it mapped some folders in
the roaming profile to the equivalent XDG folders - I have no idea how
that would work.

> I think that this has something to do with group policy. Before I 
> investigate further could anyone confirm whether it is possible to have 
> something like roaming profiles for Linux?

Usually by automounting the home directory.  All that stuff is really
part of the home directoy in LINUX [GNOME].  You can do some management
of the desktop via tools like Sabayon.

-- 
System & Network Administrator [ LPI & NCLA ]
<http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com>
OpenGroupware Developer <http://www.opengroupware.us>
Adam Tauno Williams



More information about the samba mailing list