[Samba] issue and solution : samba 4.9.4 and win10 1809 : windows could not connect to user profile service aka the home drive letter semi-colon is missing

[Rowland Penny]

On Mon, 4 Feb 2019 14:16:33 +0100
Christian Daré via samba <samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> Excuse in advance my poor english.
> After installing two new servers debian buster with samba 4.9.4 , one
> as AD ,the second as a fileserver, I was stuck when i tried to
> connect my users.
> On a Win10 client , i had the message "windows could not connect to
> user profile service".
> The only clue i had was in the event viewer, errors concerning 
> svchost.exe_ProfSvc.
> 
> After digging internet, i ve found the solution here :
> https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/lync/en-US/91a4ea6f-c1ed-43c7-afa4-3011bd896eed/windows-10-pro-version-1809-trouble-with-active-directory-connection?forum=win10itpronetworking
> 
> Before i found the solution, when i created user , i ran samba-tool
> like this :
> 
> samba-tool user create dare aze123 --use-username-as-cn 
> --profile-path=\\fileserver\profiles\dare\dare*--home-drive=U* 
> --home-directory=\\fileserver\dare --userou=OU=UBO_USERS 
> --script-path=logonscript.vbs --nis-domain=samba494 
> --unix-home=/home/d/dare  --uid=dare --uid-number=202369 
> --gid-number=51495 --gecos=Christian Dare  --login-shell=/bin/tcsh 
> --username=Administrator --password=MyPassword
> 
> This syntax seems good but the semi-colon after U is missing for
> Windows and it blocks the user login.
> 
> 
> To fix the issue, i had to add a semi-colon after the home drive
> letter like this :
> 
> samba-tool user create dare aze123 --use-username-as-cn 
> --profile-path=\\fileserver\profiles\dare\dare *--home-drive=U:* 
> --home-directory=\\fileserver\dare --userou=OU=UBO_USERS 
> --script-path=logonscript.vbs --nis-domain=samba494 
> --unix-home=/home/d/dare  --uid=dare --uid-number=202369 
> --gid-number=51495 --gecos=Christian Dare  --login-shell=/bin/tcsh 
> --username=Administrator --password=MyPassword
> 
> With this syntax, everything works fine as expected.
> 
> I think this is a new bug appeared with win10 version 1809 ( With the 
> 1803 version, i didn t see this issue )
> 
> Thanks
> Christian D
> 
> 

Yes, that looks like a bug, but it was a Windows bug that allowed the
use of a drive letter without the colon.
If you add the the drive letter from ADUC, it gets created in AD with
the colon, it has always been like this.
It looks like the examples in 'samba-tool user create' need updating
and the code needs altering to check if the '--home-drive' value is
valid.

Rowland