[Samba] several offices: home dirs, local resources, ...

Michael Tokarev mjt at tls.msk.ru
Thu Nov 17 14:24:35 UTC 2022


Hello!

This is not exactly a samba question, but maybe someone here have some input.

Historically, we had several geographically spread offices, with
local servers in each location, and local resources.  All had
their own DNS domain (a subdomain of the main domain), and local
short names like "fs" (for file server), "mail" etc.  So far so
good.  (We even had DFS working once when the load to one file
server was too high).

Home directories for the users are kept on local servers, including
the roaming profiles.  When they log in to a machine in another office,
their home dir in that office is used. So effectively, these aren't
exactly roaming, in the sense that they're not being copied between
the offices automatically - it's done on demand only.

The local LAN is fast obviously, inter-office connectivity is
dramatically slower and isn't always available, so keeping local
resources is vital.

This has always worked with NT4-style domains, worked quite well.
For over 20 years.

Now, I'm trying to switch to a Samba-based AD.  One office has been
switched, but an attempt to include another office immediately
stuck with quite some issues which I don't know how to solve.

First, the home server for the users. I want their home dirs to
be stored in *local* site (local for the computer they're logging
at).  I can't seem to find a way to make it to work, - I can configure
home server for each user in the AD, but I can't make it *different*
servers depending on the location. I can force a machine to grab
roaming profiles from a fixed server (this overrides per-user setting)
but this way, local user (eg, a local administrator account used for
rescue purposes) does not work well anymore, it too tries to store
their home dir on that server.

Second, the short names like "fs" - it should be different "fs" for
each location. I forced windows clients to use local DNS suffix
before the main domain suffix. But when this is about a file server,
the main domain suffix is always used despite that this name
exists in local subdomain too, which should be searched before.

Users are used to the short names in many years, they have lots
of shortcuts/links to these names, and I can't seem to find a
way how to make the same name to point to a different server in
each location.

How it is usually done?

Thanks!

/mjt



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