windows7 and samba

You need samba 3.4.x to make things work. There is no way with samba 3.0.28 like it comes with ubuntu8.04 LTS.

This is bad news, cause it means that users of the ubuntu 8.04 LTS need to compile their own samba cause no package will be available. (LTS means only security-updates and bugfixes but not feature-updates).
Good news is that compiling the new samba is fairly easy. Download and compile. For inexperienced users there should be several howtos available in internet.

• compile and install samba - it will be installed to /usr/local/samba
• stop samba : /etc/init.d/samba stop
• copy winns.dat and passdb.tdb from /var/lib/samba to /usr/local/private
• rename /var/lib/samba to /var/lib/samba-3.0.28 and keep in mind to delete it later when everything works
• start your new samba pointing to your existing smb.conf :

/usr/local/samba/sbin/smbd -D -s /etc/samba/smb.conf
/usr/local/samba/sbin/nmbd -D -s /etc/samba/smb.conf

everything should work now with your existing winXP-clients. Go and check it out. Especially loggin on and that kind of stuff.

Later when you are sure that everything works for days and neither users of your XP-clients nor new win7-clients are throwing stones at you any more you can delete the ubuntu-samba and remove the folder in /var/lib. You of course need to find a way how to start your own samba on system-startup.

While you have both versions on your system (which is recommendable especially if your are working during your users are working) be always sure which version of smbstatus and smbpasswd ... you are using. Using full path when invoking a program is highly recommended !! even more funny things will happen otherwise :)

short : many of the howtos in internet are wrong. Sorry to tell you. You dont need the myriads of regchanges that are recommended. The following reg-edits are sufficiant:

[HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanWorkstation\Parameters]
"DWORD DomainCompatibilityMode = 1"
"DWORD DNSNameResolutionRequired = 0"
[HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Netlogon\Parameters]
"RequireStrongKey = 0"

Then you join the domain (after you created the computeraccount with smbpasswd -a -e -m MACHINE and I used user root that is added to my smbpasswd with smbpasswd -a -e root, but any other admin-account should do)

profiles are handled by your smb.conf by the following directives:

...
logon path = \\%L\profiles\%U
...
[profiles]
        comment = NT Profiles
        path = /data/samba/profiles/%a
        browseable = Yes
        writeable = Yes
        store dos attributes = yes
        csc policy = manual
        directory mask = 0700
        create mask = 0700
        profile acls = yes
        read only = No

%a is windows-version which in case of win7 is ... Vista. Therefore a folder called Vista needs to exist in /data/samba/profiles or whereever your profile-directory is located.

%U is the username which in case of Win7 and user john is ... john.V2 ... The V2 is mandatory. So you need to create this directory in case you dont have any add-user-scripts installed. In my case windows7 did not create this directory by itself.!!

Like I did when migrating from WinNT to WinXP I tried to copy the WinXP-profiles to the Win7-profiles. I failed badly.

Die Anmeldung des Dienstes „Gruppenrichtlinienclient“ ist fehlgeschlagen
Zugruff verweigert.

I guess in english this would read somehow like “service grouppolicyclient failed” ...
I had to wipe out the profile on samba-side and as admin on client-side by deleting the whole profile. (systemsteuerung -> ...)

Then I copied only relevant parts of the WinXP-profile (like Favoriten to Favorits or ApplicationDate/Mozilla/Firefox to AppData/roaming/Mozilla and so on)