[Samba] wiki entry regarding updating self compiled samba addc (4.11.x -> 4.15.0 in my case)

rme at bluemail.ch rme at bluemail.ch
Tue Sep 28 22:24:51 UTC 2021


> I thought everyone was trying to get away from roaming profiles because, 
> for example the AppData folder starts to fill up with cruft like browser 
> and email caches, making login/logout times unbearably long for users.

It's rather about Microsoft and others trying to push you using cloud 
services. They don't want you to do this for free or even without 
running into a vendor lock-in of course.
Actually the concept of Windows using %AppData% for roaming data and 
%LocalAppData% for local data (which is not roaming and therefore not 
synchronized at logoff is quite good. Sure there are some applications 
which totally fail to make use of this concept and store heaps of caches 
and volatile data belonging to %LocalAppData% or even %TEMP% to roaming 
%AppData% folder. But some of those applications can be pre-configured 
to store data into the right location and others (like Firefox) can be 
configured using policies to keep the profile folders relatively clean. 
For Firefox there is also open bug reports to review the %AppData% 
folder structure and contents to move volatile data away from it.

If all fails you can also exclude paths from roaming so you might 
exclude AppData\Roaming\xyz from roaming and therefore prevent Windows 
from synchronizing it at logon/logoff.

With current SMB3 capabilities a typical profile including a Firefox 
profile is perhaps around 200MB and is delaying the logon on a modern 
LAN for about 10-20 seconds only - except you are logging on to a 
machine for the first time which requires to download the complete 
profile or you use policies to always wipe the local profile on logoff.


> Does this work better than in the PDC/NTLM days? I'm in the process of 
> upgrading such a network (which has admittedly been in place far too 
> long) and it literally takes 45 minutes for users to logon or logoff.

I am not really having problems with Windows 10 clients and roaming 
profiles on medium sized installations. However there are occasional 
users complaining about long logon times. Those users are usually the 
ones keeping heaps of data (talking about Gigabytes) on Desktop or other 
roaming folders. So you can also remind those users NOT to do this as 
mostly policies in companies should disallow storing data locally but 
rather using shares. You can also use folder-redirection along with 
roaming profiles to lower the size of roaming profiles by directing 
typically large folders like documents, videos or even desktop to 
network shares directly so they don't need to get synced on logoff.



> Final question about this: The page referenced above shows a chart of 
> Windows profile suffixes. Since part of this project includes setting up 
> several new PCs which will presumably be upgraded to the most current 
> version of Windows 10, I found the lack of a server reference in that 
> chart for Profile version V6 to be a but unnerving. Does this mean Samba 
> does not work with V6 profiles; or maybe I should be asking what is the 
> difference between, say, V4, V5, and V6?

The version is directly appended to the path you configure in GPO or in 
user profile configuration. The reason for the version is that the data 
structure changed. In Windows up to XP the %LocalAppData% tree was 
stored at "%UserProfile%\Local Settings" while this was changed to 
%UserProfile%\AppData\Local (%LocalAppData%) and 
%UserProfile%\AppData\Roaming (%AppData%) later.

Microsoft also recommends to set the prefix via policy. So When future 
versions (actually I don't know if they opted for using V7 or other 
prefix in Windows 11) are introduced the path does not change. However 
at the risk of mixing profile structures. So for example you could use a 
Windows 7 profile all the way up to Windows 10 without actually having 
to re-create it as the base structure did not change. However some 
additional folders were introduced along the way.


> I'm guessing this fact alone should be a deterrent to using Windows 
> Profiles? "Most notable about Windows 10, however, is that the 'profile 
> version' increments can now happen with Windows 10’s feature upgrades."

So just "freeze" the suffix via GPO if you need to. However I personally 
opted not to do this. If a future Windows is adding another suffix I 
will just symlink the old to the new folder on Linux if the profiles are 
compatible so users keep using the same profile in future versions.



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