samba - Apr 2013 - Breaking up user homes by letter

Hi,

 

I've been digging all over and I can't seem to find an answer to this.

 

Is there a way to have Samba assign home  directory paths by the first
letter of a username and then the actual username underneath? Like this:

 

/Users/j/Johnson

 

If I can, is there a way for Samba to also still direct the user right into
that folder if in Windows they were to enter \\sbmserver\username
<file:///\\sbmserver\username> ?

 

I'm just trying to separate out the home directories as this may possibly be
used by 1000+ at once and I'm worried about performance having all the homes
in one directory.

 

Chris

Hello,


Am 22.04.2013 23:45, schrieb Christopher Horsager:
> Is there a way to have Samba assign home  directory paths by the first
> letter of a username and then the actual username underneath? Like this:
>
> /Users/j/Johnson
Maybe I understand you wrong, but you don't really need to do anything 
special in samba for that.

Depending on your samba installation, the path on your unix server, 
where the homes are located, is defined in AD (unixHomeDirectory), 
openLDAP, passwd or whereever. In your smb.conf, you don't need a
'path'
parameter for the 'homes' share:

[homes]
    read only = No
    browseable = No
    valid users = %S

See 'man smb.conf' for 'The [homes] section':
   If no path was given, the path is set to the user's home directory.

So samba set the 'path' parameter for every user in that share to the 
one, that is defined in the backend.



> If I can, is there a way for Samba to also still direct the user right into
> that folder if in Windows they were to enter \\sbmserver\username
> <file:///\\sbmserver\username> ?
If you have a '[homes]' share, then you automatically having a 
\\smbserver\username share, pointing for every user it's unixHomeDirectory.




 > I'm just trying to separate out the home directories as this may
 > possibly be used by 1000+ at once and I'm worried about performance
 > having all the homes in one directory.

You also can create a share with 'path = /home' and point the users home
folder to '\\smbserver\x\%USERNAME%'. This you can change with a small 
script.





If you ment something else, then please provide some more information 
about your environment (samba version, AD/NT4 environment, userbackend, 
DC/member server, etc.).



Regards,
Marc

On Monday, April 22, 2013 04:45:15 PM Christopher Horsager
wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
hello,
> 
> I've been digging all over and I can't seem to find an answer to
this.
> 
> 
> 
> Is there a way to have Samba assign home  directory paths by the first
> letter of a username and then the actual username underneath? Like this:
> 
I use bind mount and symlink for that.
but I've done the split to ease the backup not for performance reason.
> 
> 
> /Users/j/Johnson
> 
> 
> 
> If I can, is there a way for Samba to also still direct the user right into
> that folder if in Windows they were to enter \\sbmserver\username
> <file:///\\sbmserver\username> ?
> 
> 
> 
> I'm just trying to separate out the home directories as this may
possibly be
> used by 1000+ at once and I'm worried about performance having all the
> homes in one directory.
> 
Listing 1000+ directories may be slow but (on my system a least) chdir in one 
of them is fast wathever the number is.
> 
> 
> Chris