Heres the gig.
I currently have Samba running on Mandrake 10 as simple file server for three WinXP Pro clients. I now want to move up to a PDC setup with roaming profiles. AFter reading alot of Samba how tos i am unclear about something.

THe goal:
Each of the three XP machines have multiple users with Outlook Express email accounts fixed to one machine only.E.g XPmachine 1 user1, user2, XP machine 2 has user 3, user 4 etc.

I would like the office users to be able to logon to any XP workstation and access their emails thru the use of Samba as PDC and roaming profiles. (Maybe they have to move to Outlook - this is OK)

The question(s):
Registry hacks aside for XP Pro, i know each machine has to be setup to join the samba based domain. I now each user needs a samba account and linux account and that this can be handled in the smb.conf. My question is do I need to manually create all the user accounts i will need on the XP clients too?.

Another way of asking this is if i have a user account on XP machine1 but not XP machine 2, what happens when i try to logon with my user account details to XP machine 2? Is a profile copied from the linux box to the XP machine temporarily? How does the roaming profile roam around on XP?

A patient read and reply welcome!

alans

I cant help wonder if this post was too dense for the general quick fire stuff that gets posted here? Thereare so many posts that i wonder if it justs get lost too.........

great forum though

It may be that you have specified the wrong tool for the job here.

The most common way of doing this is IMAP, rather than putting the mailboxes on a Samba share. With IMAP the user's mail is kept on the server itself, and is accessed by the mail client through the IMAP service. Outlook Express apparently supports IMAP reasonably well, but Outlook's IMAP support is horrible.

The mail account settings for Outlook and Outlook Express are part of the user's profile. If you use Samba as a PDC and store roaming Windows profiles on the server users can login at any PC, automatically receive their profile and then access the mail held on the server with Outlook Express through IMAP.

Another advantage of IMAP is that you can also install a Webmail frontend. Webmail software is just another client as far as the IMAP service is concerned.

Mandrake will have packages for IMAP software (UW-IMAP is a simple IMAP service, Courier and Cyrus are for larger and more complex installations). It will probably also have a package for SquirrelMail, which is the most popular Webmail software.

I beleive that once you have set up an IMAP account in Outlook Express you can copy the mail from the existing folders to IMAP folders in the normal way.

I wouldn't be surprised if Thunderbird has even better support for IMAP than the Microsoft products, and you might consider it for testing, even though it hasn't reached version 1 yet.

From experience supporting these products, the ways that Outlook and Outlook Express store mail make data loss much more likely that it should be. So switching to IMAP is a good move for that reason alone.

The documentation for Samba is excellent, so the PDC and roaming profiles setup shouldn't be too difficult.

Hope that helps !