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

[Michael Tokarev]

18.11.2022 02:25, Norbert Hanke via samba wrote:
> Hi Michael,
> 
> Location-specific DFS might help you: an UNC path looks the same across
> all offices from the Windows client side, but it is resolves specific
> for the office it is being accessed from.
> 
> The concept is explained in Microsoft terms here:
> https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/storage/dfs-namespaces/dfs-overview
> .
> 
> Concluding from a different mail thread, you are working on AD sites
> reflecting different offices. Once you have that working - site-specific
> AD-DCs in the various offices of your company, it will not be a big step
> to get site-specific "Folder Targets" (in Microsoft terms) implemented.
> E.g. \\your.domain.fqdn\profiles\userA will point to a share hosted in
> the office of that user, or even \\your.domain.fqdn\profiles could be
> site-specific. Technically on the samba DC it's just a matter of a few
> entries in smb.conf plus symbolic links in the file system of the DC.

Hi Norbert!  That seems like a very interesting way.  I just configured
[profiles] share on a DC, with msdfs root enabled, and created a folder
in it with `mjt' username, pointing to the right file server.

Now I wonder how to configure shares like \\domain.tld\profiles to work?
And should it work with the short name (\\domain\profiles) ?


> I tried to get DFS running with Samba DCs a few years ago. I was not
> successful, and because it was not important for my use case I did not
> try for long and gave up. In theory it should work, and maybe one or the
> other bug might have been resolved in the meantime.

Do you mean the microsoft-tool-manageable DFS, like described in the
doc you pointed to above?  I don't think I really need this so far, it
is easy enough to crate the symlinks :) (btw, these names in the DFS
root really act and shown as symlinks by windows).

What I really want is a short fileserver name (FS) - which the users
are used to, - to point to a site-specific server - this is the main
goal, to register "FS" name local to each site.

A seems-to-be-easier goal is to provide local (site-specific) storage
for user profiles, but that one might be a bit easier since it can
be configured in a single place which is not directly used by the
users (so users wont have to reconfigure all their shortcuts for
example).


> And BTW, thank you for all your hard work for the Debian samba packages!
> You're doing a big favour to the samba community.

You are welcome :)

Thank you!

/mjt