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[Samba] Samba 3.4, Windows 7, Roaming profiles and Folder redirection

July 21st, 2011 - 11:10 am ET by Tanuki uk | Report spam
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Hello,
I'm quite new to Samba administration and I've inherited a working samba
setup with roaming profiles however the login and logout times for users has
been growing and I'm starting to think it's time do something about it. I'm
thinking redirect some folders to a samba share on the network will speed up
the login and logout times.

Our setup has 25 Windows 7 workstations and about 10 laptop users(also on
windows 7) all connecting to one Samba server. The laptops are often not on
the main office network so i was planning to use offline file sync for the
network drive i would be redirecing to, is this a bad idea for some reason?

I've had a look around at various documentation and details seem
quite scarce. However all the documentation I've found is targeted at
Windows XP or suggests using domain wide Group Policy Objects (GPO's). My
understanding is that GPO's can only be used if you have a Windows AD server
or Samba 4 however I don't have a Windows server and Samba 4 is abit too
bleeding edge for a production deployment(?).

If anyone can point me to some good documentation it would be really useful,
I would love to see an updated "The Official Samba HOWTO and Reference
Guide" or similar. Thought's comments or insights are also more then
welcome.

Thanks,
Tanuki
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#1 Geert Mak
July 21st, 2011 - 12:50 pm ET | Report spam
On 21.07.2011, at 17:07, Tanuki uk wrote:
Hello,
I'm quite new to Samba administration and I've inherited a working samba
setup with roaming profiles however the login and logout times for users has
been growing and I'm starting to think it's time do something about it.



I'd be curious what you are going to do.

I personally inherited a similar situation a year ago, where the roaming profiles were supposed to allow the users to work from different locations in a 50 people company spread around two buildings on three floors. As far as I understand the roaming profiles, one has to log out in order to log in. This was the first problem - people used to log into one PC, then into another, and then wonder where their desktop items have gone (last logout overwrites the previous). Could be something has been set wrong, I did not investigate. Also they had these huge long loading and unloading times. Also, they do not have everywhere the same software (some licenses are expensive). So I stopped using roaming profiles and introduced Remote desktop. Now people, who happen to be "somewhere" in the company and need to access their PC, just open Remote desktop, remember the last three digits of their IP address (192.168.1.*) and they are on their PC, all apps open as they have left them, etc.

But of course, this is one scenario, which might not be good in all cases. Our users work 80% of their time on their PC and then it happens they need to work for a couple of hours on another PC, which happens to be free at this moment. Just thought it might help to share it with you.

Geert.
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