[Samba] smb.conf for around 2500 users

Samba4 with Linux and Windows clients wanting to get the same home
folder data.

Hi
A college has students arranged with Linux home directories according to
which year they belong to and which class within that year, a or b or
whatever, they belong to e.g.:
/home2/students/year7/year7a/student1
/home2/students/year7/year7a/student2
...
...
/home2/students/year13/year13a/student2500

To get at the same data on windows, I was thinking of a share for each
of the classes e.g.
[year7a]
path = /home2/students/year7/year7a
read only = No
browsable = No
...
...
[year13a]
path = /home2/students/year13/year13a
read only = No
browsable = No

and mapping a drive letter to the share e.g.
map Z: to \\server\year7a\%USERNAME%

On Mon, 2012-07-02 at 17:39 +0200, steve wrote:

Samba4 with Linux and Windows clients wanting to get the same home
folder data.

Hi
A college has students arranged with Linux home directories according to
which year they belong to and which class within that year, a or b or
whatever, they belong to e.g.:
/home2/students/year7/year7a/student1
/home2/students/year7/year7a/student2
...
...
/home2/students/year13/year13a/student2500

To get at the same data on windows, I was thinking of a share for each
of the classes e.g.
[year7a]
path = /home2/students/year7/year7a
read only = No
browsable = No
...
...
[year13a]
path = /home2/students/year13/year13a
read only = No
browsable = No

and mapping a drive letter to the share e.g.
map Z: to \\server\year7a\%USERNAME%

Deal with it through your NSS mechanism so that the file server knows
for \\server\%USERNAME% where the users home directory is actually
located and then you can just use the special [homes] share.

I do this with winbind and the unixHomeDirectory attribute in AD.

JAB.

On 02/07/12 17:49, Jonathan Buzzard wrote:

On Mon, 2012-07-02 at 17:39 +0200, steve wrote:

Samba4 with Linux and Windows clients wanting to get the same home
folder data.

Hi
A college has students arranged with Linux home directories according to
which year they belong to and which class within that year, a or b or
whatever, they belong to e.g.:
/home2/students/year7/year7a/student1
/home2/students/year7/year7a/student2
...
...
/home2/students/year13/year13a/student2500

To get at the same data on windows, I was thinking of a share for each
of the classes e.g.
[year7a]
path = /home2/students/year7/year7a
read only = No
browsable = No
...
...
[year13a]
path = /home2/students/year13/year13a
read only = No
browsable = No

and mapping a drive letter to the share e.g.
map Z: to \\server\year7a\%USERNAME%

Deal with it through your NSS mechanism so that the file server knows
for \\server\%USERNAME% where the users home directory is actually
located and then you can just use the special [homes] share.

I do this with winbind and the unixHomeDirectory attribute in AD.

JAB.

Hi Jonathan
Thanks for the quick response.

I think I must be missing something here because as far as I can see,
winbindd puts all users into the directory specified in template
homedir. [homes] then picks out the user from there.

At the moment we are using nss-pam-ldapd to grab the unixHomeDirectory
from AD. How do I get winbindd or nss to map unixHomeDirectory to
something I can then map to a windows drive letter?

Cheers,
Steve

Samba4 with Linux and Windows clients wanting to get the same home
folder data.

Hi
A college has students arranged with Linux home directories according
to which year they belong to and which class within that year, a or b
or whatever, they belong to e.g.:
/home2/students/year7/year7a/student1
/home2/students/year7/year7a/student2
...
...
/home2/students/year13/year13a/student2500

To get at the same data on windows, I was thinking of a share for each
of the classes e.g.
[year7a]
path = /home2/students/year7/year7a
read only = No
browsable = No
...
...
[year13a]
path = /home2/students/year13/year13a
read only = No
browsable = No

and mapping a drive letter to the share e.g.
map Z: to \\server\year7a\%USERNAME%

That would make lots of shares but would make it readable to non admins.

Is there a limit on the number of shares per installation?
Any other ideas of how to go about it? e.g. I thought about OU's but
we do not want to administer from Windows.

Cheers,
Steve

On 02/07/12 17:20, steve wrote:

On 02/07/12 17:49, Jonathan Buzzard wrote:

On Mon, 2012-07-02 at 17:39 +0200, steve wrote:

Hi Steve,
Have you considered using autofs to do all of the mapping work for you,
so that you have only one /homes/ (or whatever else you want to call it)
to worry about?

L