[wplug] samba & roaming profiles

[redtoade]

I'm not sure if I completely understand your final
objective here, but feel free to correct me if I'm
wrong.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with Windows, so let
me recap what I know, and check me for accuracy.

:)

Win98 stores all profile information in 
C:\windows\profiles\<username>\

under which you'll find directories for desktop,
favorites, my documents and such.  This is if you have
profiles enabled on each (and every) Win box.  Those
little checkmarks that appear when you add a new user?
 You want the ones that DON'T save hard drive space...
individual settings per user.  Otherwise all of your
users share disk space under the C:\windows\ dir.

Now as to where Outlook *.pst files are stored...
that's completely random.  When a user first logs into
Outlook, it'll set up his *.pab (address book) and
*.pst (personal folders) wherever he/she wants them. 
Typically, I stick them in 
C:\windows\profiles\<username>\application
data\Outlook\

In a network-less world, each client would maintain
it's own profiles directory, which doesn't do you any
good.  You may wish to have all of this data stored on
a central server.  (Linux box preferred)  Each
profiles directory would appear under the Linux /home
dir.  That way they would be secured down by the linux
user security and not open for all to see (as in
Windows.)  And there would be only one copy of this
info instead of local copies floating on each Win
client.

The trick then is setting up samba so that each users
home directory appears as an SMB file share. 
Fortunately, this is typically the default smb.conf
that comes with samba.  I still like using SWAT for
smb.conf configuration.  It's a web interface that's
pretty straightforward to use... kind of like right
clicking on network neighborhood in the Win98 world.

Once you had the central server presenting the info,
you would need to point Win98 (on each client) to look
at this shared server directory as if it was the
actual local profile dir... I've never done this
before.  You would either need a Windows version of
symlink, or to change the settings to use the SMB
share as the default profile folder.  That would take
some "looking into."

Is this what you were thinking of doing?  I don't want
to go into too much more detail if this isn't at all
what you want.

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