I have been running Samba on LM9.0 serving Win 9x and Win XP Pro MAchines. I recently installed LM9.2 and Samba 2.2.8a and copied all my config files. This of course required reconnecting each Win XP Pro box to my local domain. No problem but when users started to logon it was as if their profiles never existed. eg A person logs in, opens Word, goes through the Office network install procedure. They log out and then back in again, opens word again and goes through the install procedure again as if they were logging on for the first time.
I found that if I delete a users ntuser.dat file in their profile the problem is solved but their previous favourites, email settings, My Docs. folder, etc are all over ridden.
Any solution or info. on this would be greatly appreciated.

If you are going to upgrade a server or move a samba server to a different box, you will need to to the following. You will need to copy the smbpasswd file and smb.conf file to the new box. If you decide to change the file paths you can do so without affecting the users on the network. The most important thing is to create the users with the same UIDS and GIDS as they were on the older box. You can copy their /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow info from the old files to the new ones. You also need to do the same for the workstations. I have done this successfully and moved a domain controller and a couple of file servers to newer boxes without any interruptions to the services. (Well, from the users' point of view.) We took everything down when users were out of the office. You also need to reset the permissions and ownership to what they were on the old box. I did not even need to rejoin the computers to the domain because the info was the same.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for your reply. I did all that you said re. passwd, UID's, GID's, permissions, etc. on the transfer to the new server. There were no problems with Win 9x, just Win XP Profiles

Just realized something. Did you use the sid from the old domain? You need to do:

-S DOMAIN Retrieve the domain SID for DOMAIN before you take the samba server down, then do

-W S-1-5-... Write the SID S-1-5-... to the secrets file after you upgrade using the sid that the former command spits out.

That bit I did not know about. Thanks a million for the help.

can u just move the secrets.tdb file over to the new server?

You might do well to upgrade Samba too, there have been quite a few bug fixes since the version that you are running.

Got the solution.
For samba 2.8 to get the sid type smbpasswd -X servername
To set the new server sid type smbpasswd -W sid from first command
For samba 3 type net getlocalsid
To set the new server type net setlocalsid (with the old sid attached)

You sir are my personal hero. I mistakenly used an old K-6 450 wtih 256 meg of ram for my samba server (40 users) and people had a noticable delay when they were logging in. I moved them to a 2.4ghz celeron with 512 meg of ram. I followed your instructions to a T and my users don't notice a difference and now they are on the new machine. Thank you so much!

Travis