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strange problems with roaming profiles after upgrade sme6.5-sme7.2

Offline chrismaltby

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Has anyone ever managed to upgrade SME to 7.x with an existing roaming profile setup? The upgrade went smoothly enough - though I restored config and user data onto a clean install of SME 7.2 more or less manually using rsync.

The symptoms are that old accounts and machines work more or less as expected, but that new machines and new users get messages at login saying that the profile can't be located or that it can't be loaded, or even that the domain controller can't be contacted. Different users get different responses on the same desktop.

The environment is 95% WinXP, with 1 remaining Win2k box which is mostly off. I have applied the gpedit hack to stop XP checking for profile ownership (helped some people but not everyone), and tried various settings for the domain master/client session encryption/signing etc. It's easy to make the problem worse and I ended up completely re-installing one machine when it wouldn't talk to the server for login at all - every domain user was rejected. Leaving and joining the domain sometimes makes things better and sometimes worse.

Today I disabled roaming profiles but this doesn't stop desktops complaining that the profiles can't be found nor some systems refusing to log in some users.

I am just about ready to toss Windows out of the place and go with something it's possible to debug... has anyone lived through this before? Are there docs which explain exactly what gpedit settings are needed to work with Samba (or if samba.conf needs tweaking too)?

The most annoying feature of the profile being missing or whatever is that acrobat reader won't start because it wants to write to the user registry which is read-only. Explaining to the poor users that the problem isn't acrobat always generates a blank stare...

Offline CharlieBrady

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Re: strange problems with roaming profiles after upgrade sme6.5-sme7.2
« Reply #1 on: October 23, 2007, 01:31:47 AM »
Has anyone ever managed to upgrade SME to 7.x with an existing roaming profile setup?

Hi Chris.

Please report any problems, strange or otherwise, via the Bug Tracker.

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The upgrade went smoothly enough - though I restored config and user data onto a clean install of SME 7.2 more or less manually using rsync.

Mixing config and data with a clean install needs to be done carefully, as old and new passwd/shadow/group files need to be merged, so that file ownerships don't mysteriously change.

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The symptoms are that old accounts and machines work more or less as expected, but that new machines and new users get messages at login saying that the profile can't be located or that it can't be loaded, or even that the domain controller can't be contacted. Different users get different responses on the same desktop.

Hmmm. Fun. Please provide these details in your bug report and we'll try to work out what's happening.


Offline chrismaltby

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Re: strange problems with roaming profiles after upgrade sme6.5-sme7.2
« Reply #2 on: October 23, 2007, 04:53:54 AM »
Thanks Charlie,

Well I'm not sure it's a bug in SME server - the server works fine for some people and client machines. I don't think you want general complaints about Windows in the bug tracker unless I can track it down to a samba version change issue - and then the fix would be a release note at best. I was hoping that someone who had done something like this may have some experience to share.

And yes, I was very careful to merge the password file/accounts DB and the other stuff, including smbpasswd. The machine accounts kept working for all the machines which were switched off during the upgrade. The one which was accidentally left on got confused, but leaving and rejoining the domain helped it somewhat.

I suppose the next step is to turn up the debug level in samba.conf and see what the server thinks is going on.

Chris

Offline CharlieBrady

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Re: strange problems with roaming profiles after upgrade sme6.5-sme7.2
« Reply #3 on: October 23, 2007, 05:14:06 AM »
Well I'm not sure it's a bug in SME server - the server works fine for some people and client machines.

It should "just work". If it doesn't, and it's not something we can fix, then we want to document it. Either way, the Bug Tracker is where we can turn a problem report into some action - or a documented decision not to act.

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I suppose the next step is to turn up the debug level in samba.conf and see what the server thinks is going on.

Yep. I'm also keen to try the RHEL5 version of samba, recompiled for CentOS4. But as you'll see in http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3355 I haven't had buy-in from others on that proposal. I can supply RPMs if it's inconvenient for you to build them.

See also http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1698 and various other samba related bugs open against SME 7.x.