[Samba] Linux users and Samba 4

Adam Tauno Williams awilliam at whitemice.org
Wed Nov 30 09:46:37 MST 2011


On Wed, 2011-11-30 at 17:37 +0100, steve wrote:
> On 30/11/11 16:40, Matthieu Patou wrote:
> > Matthieu,
> > On 30/11/2011 08:09, steve wrote:
> >> Yep. I realise the 'alphaness' of Samba 4 but I think I am not alone
> >> with my issue. I think I should be easy to fix now before it goes beta.
> > Certainly true, why not trying to start working on solution on your own,
> > by doing the first move you have much more insurance that someone else
> > will help you to make it good for master tree.
> Well, I'm no developer and only have an old laptop running from a usb 
> memory stick for testing but I've made a start by adding a home 
> directory attribute to Samba 4 user database using phpldapadmin. But now 
> I'm stuck since I don't know where or how the roaming profiles are 
> stored. In Samba 3 there were stored in the /home of the user. 

The statement "In Samba 3 there were stored in the /home of the user" is
false.  They are stored where they are configured to be stored;  we do
not store profiles in home directories [and generall i think that is a
bad idea].  Samba4 provisions a shared volume for storing a user's
roaming profile.

By default something like -

 [profiles]
       path = /usr/local/samba/var/profiles
       read only = no

Which is very much the same as S3.

> With AD 
> it seems that they are all be saved in a [profiles] share.

Yes, and the nothing changed there.

> think I understand so I think the solution to single sign on with Samba 
> 4 would be linking the roaming profile to a users /home folder.

No. The roaming profile is the roaming profile, the user's home
directory is the user's home directory.  You can map a drive to their
home directory or use folder redirection via policy [just like in
Samba3].

> the profiles share subfolder the /home folder for Linux. With Samba3 and 
> LDAP, all this was centralised and easy to administer.

I don't know about "easy".  After many years it feels a bit more like cleverly-hacked.
:)

> would create an LDAP user for you and give him the Samba attributes he 
> needed. It even created his home folder too. It was simple for a linux 
> user to logon to windows and vica versa. Samba 4 takes away this 
> centralisation. It also has the inconvenience of having to use windows 
> to administer the Samba server.

This loss is temporary until the tool-chain catches up to Samba 4 -
which provides Python bindings, command line tools, and [of course] the
entire AD RPC approach.

> I feel that Samba dev's have forgotten that Linux clients are just as 
> important as windows clients in the network. They seem to think that 
> Linux is only ever used as a server and clients are only ever windows 7!

Heh, I think the current situation sucks for servers to! :)  But nobody
has forgotten anything - it is just not there yet.  A simple issue of
resource constraints.

> Another bit I don't get is where is a file that is created on a windows 
> client is stored on the Samba server? The documentation is not clear 
> here. As basic as that.

That works the same as in Samba 3.

> Does any of this make sense?

The frustration, yes, and it is shared.  Getting from S3 to AD has been
ugly going so far.  But many of your presumptions are incorrect;  you
are assuming that things configured by your tool-chain are fundamental
Samba behaviors.





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