samba - May 2007 - roaming profiles in a home environment

Hi all,

I think I know the answer to this, but I'll ask anyway to be sure that
I've
got it right.  My home network consists of a Vista box that is used for TV
only, my workstation, and our laptop.  Both the workstation and the laptop
are used by my wife and me.  The laptop is on the wifi network.  I then have
a fedora FC6 box that is running samba and I'm trying to expand it from a
simple fileshare to a domain master.

My question is about the value of roaming profiles.  I really like the idea,
but I don't think I've prepared to pay the performance hit of copying
megabytes of data (a basic empty profile created for my last laptop login
was 2.3M).  The functionality I'm interested in (all nice to have, most have
workarounds) are:
  - same outlook setup for my wife on both laptop and pc
  - shared favourites, cookies

I'm assuming that I'd be better off not using roaming profiles, but
instead
using folder redirection (in outlook's case simply put the files on the
share).

So - two questions:
1. Is the above a reasonable viewpoint?
2. Can I setup folder redirect through samba via a policy file, or will I
need to do it on each PC individually?

cheers,
dim

> I'm assuming that I'd be better off not using roaming profiles, but
instead
> using folder redirection (in outlook's case simply put the files on the
> share).
Yes.
> So - two questions:
> 1. Is the above a reasonable viewpoint?
> 2. Can I setup folder redirect through samba via a policy file, or will I
> need to do it on each PC individually?
You can perform folder redirection via policies from a Samba PDC;  just
the same as if you were using an NT4 PDC (see older Windows NT domain
documentation;  this is really a Windows thing,  not specific to Samba).

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams, Network & Systems Administrator
Consultant - http://www.whitemiceconsulting.com
Developer - http://www.opengroupware.org