Topic: Roaming Profiles - Interesting Issue

[grattman]

Hola gurus,

I have run across an issue that is frankly stumping me. Here is an idea of what is going on.

I had two SME 7.X boxes. Box 1 (XXX.XXX.0.3) is the PDC, roaming profiles set to no, and had all users on it. Box 2 (XXX.XXX.0.5) had roaming profiles set to yes, and all the users and was a storage server. I edited the smb.conf through templating to map a Z: drive to Box 2 and everything worked fine for years.

This year, we needed to consolidate the servers so we took Box 2 offline. We changed Box 1 PDC smb.conf (using templating) to reflect these changes such as pointing back to its IP address. Then changed roaming profiles to yes.

This change created an inability to have roaming profiles on the Windoze machines now. New users, old users, all have cannot locate roaming profile issue.

I bet that if I stood Box 2 back up and set everything as it was, it would work. So I am confused why what I did would have caused this issue. Did I mist a step somewhere?

Your input is always appreciated.

Grattman

[Stefano]

IIUC, you are saying that server 1 was set as domain controller but profiles were on server 2..

[grattman]

Took me a while to understand IIUC, but yes, profiles and mapped drives were on server 2. If I have time today, I might try to stand it back up and see if my presumption, that it will work is true.

[idp_qbn]

Grattman,
I think (99% sure) this is a Windows issue. Any tinkering with profiles causes the Windows PCs to think the newly created profile is the "wrong" one, so it creates a new profile and does not use the roaming profile.
 To check, using Windows XP: Right click My Computer, choose Properties, then Advanced, then User profiles.

If you see an entry something like  this in the user profiles (for user "fred")
       fred    21Mb     roaming
       fred.000 156Kb local
- then that is your problem. User "fred" is getting the "fred.000" profile when they log on.

If so, I suggest you look to Windows Forums for help with the issue.
Someone else here may be able to help you, but I really think it is Windows not SME

As another issue, do you NEED roaming profiles? Best avoided if you can - especially if people don't actually "roam" from desk to desk.

Cheers - and good luck
Ian

[janet]

grattman

Did you copy the user profiles from server2 to server1 ?
Use tar & ssh to transfer them between boxes, so as to retain correct permissions and ownership etc.

[axessit]

Interesting that you had the two SME servers set up in the one environment, how or did you synchronise the user names & passwords ? Or did you set it on each SME machine.

Can you post your old and new smb.conf templates, as this is probably everything to do with it.