Topic: My Samba PDC move question

[TMP]

Hi all, I have been searching the forums and have not quite found or been able to piece together what I am looking for.

I have mandrake 10 with Samba 3 running my PDC currently.  It is very much screwed up (won't get into how or why here but suffice to say that no one has been able to resolve any of the issues I am having).  Basically I want to install SME (probably 6.0.1-01) and use it as my PDC but I do not want to have to recreate the local profiles for all of my users.  Is there any way to migrate my user and group accounts from Mandrake to SME?  

Thanks for any insight anyone can offer.

TMP

[azche24]

Hi,

you want to move the messed up samba to SME - good idea!

A. Back up the directories on your old server containing

1. Data
2. User-Home
3. User-Profiles

and then set all your WS away from the old SAMBA-Domain (e.g. to workgroup "workgroup".

B. Set up a new SME 7.0pre1 and create users and ibays. Assign appropriate rights to ibays.

C. Copy Data from 1. to ibays. Assign rights, check rights and chmod ibays to match usergroup. Copy Data from A.2 to /home/e-smith/files/users/%USERNAME% and assign/check rights there.

D. Join your WS back again to the new Domain on SME7. Do not care about profiles. Add users from SME7 to the WS. Log into WS as local administrator. Copy old profile/directories/username (they still exist on the WS normally!) to /profile/directories/username-new on the WS but without the hidden files NTUSER.DAT and such in the profile-directory.

E. Adjust printers to new printqueue on SME7.

I know this is "sneaker-administration". But it worked for me (8 WS from SME6 to SME7) and all the other stuff (e.g. copying the samba configuration files to the new server) did not work.  Backup of profile-directories ist just for security reasons.

[TMP]

Thanks for the detailed reply.  I am curious though.  Why exactly should I chose SME7pre1 over SME6.0.1?  Is 7 stable enough to use in a corporate environment.  This server will be operating a multi-site nationwide network.

Thanks again for your insights

TMP

[azche24]

Hi,

I am curious though.  Why exactly should I chose SME7pre1 over SME6.0.1?  Is 7 stable enough to use in a corporate environment.  This server will be operating a multi-site nationwide network.

I upgraded from 6.01 to 7 for better hardware-support (SATA, GB-Lan, RAID), for Samba 3 over 2.0.12 (works better with our WinXP Boxes) and better integration of spamfilter, clamav and such. Exactly i never missed 6.01 since. No need for complicated addons and contribs so far. And SME7 is rock-stable. No downtimes for any reason but reconfigure/reboot after yum updates.

But don't ask me about nationwide networks.
I am part-time admin in a soho environment.  
But i perhaps would not choose SME as PDC for such a big network. A common linux distro perhaps is easier to tweak and tune.

[vincentmeek]

Invaluable tool - Profile Wizard

We used this during our last SBS migration.  From ForensiT.com, there is also a User Profile Manager on their website that does more, but this was enough for what we needed.  You can use it to reassign user accounts to use different existing user profiles, even ones that Windows shows as unknown accounts.  I think it even lets you assign multiple users to use the same profile.