[Samba] Redirected folders and mental health

Mark Fox mark.fox at ecacs16.ab.ca
Wed Aug 14 16:15:30 MDT 2013


We are very close to being comfortable enough with Samba4 to begin moving
it into production. We've got a PDC and AD running, machines can join the
domain, authentication works, but we're having some fun with profiles.

We're running 4.0.5 via the Sernet PPA on Ubuntu 12.04LTS. Workstations are
Windows7.

We require roaming profiles with redirection of the obvious sub-folders.
We've deployed GPOs to do just this and it works...except when it doesn't.

The symptoms are that everything just works for some users, roaming
profiles work nicely along with redirection, but for others the user sees
an empty profile from their Windows workstation. From the server, the
redirected folders appear on the server on log in and the profile is
created on logout as one would expect. But when it doesn't work on the
workstation, if the user clicks on the start button, then on their
username, they see an empty folder. When it works, they see the usual
Desktop, My Documents, Downloads, and associated folders, all with the
"available" symbol in the folder's icon.

Users that work seem to consistently work. Users that don't consistently
don't. Or so it seems. We are just now beginning to think the problem is
with certain machines and are reinstalling Windows 7 on a couple of
machines from scratch to test this.

The one thing that worries me about our setup is that we have a Samba3 PDC
on the same VLAN/subnet as the new Samba4 PDC. But this VLAN/subnet is
separate from the workstations.

Mark


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