RE: Integrated Directory Service.

[Nate Cull <culln xtra co nz>]

> I worked with some big companies and one of the things most of them 
> demanded was "Roaming/Network user profiles". With Network profiles (which 
> Windows provides), a user can logon at any computer, validates himself with 
> a directory service on the network (a.k.a Domain Controller in Windows) , 
> and gets its profile from the directory service. 

Profiles?  As in NT?  Please God no.  Here's why...

I work at a small community college where we've standardised on NT4
Workstations (about 1200 of them) across the campus, and we live by roaming
profiles.  There's simply no other way to manage a workstation-centric
operating system like NT.  (We are using Netware 5, not NT Server on the
backend, which helps tremendously.  NT4 just doesn't have the admin tools).  

However, it's my experience that NT-style workstation profiles (which are
downloaded at login and uploaded to the network filesystem at logout) simply are
far too fragile in any real-world network environment.  Due to network
latency, accidental disconnections, etc, they tend to corrupt themselves on a
weekly basis.

The file that most often gets corrupted is the NT User Registry, and if Unix
systems can stay away from reinventing a single point of failure like this it
will be a big bonus.  But by far the simplest solution would be this:  DON'T
use NT-style downloadable, fragile profiles!  Use the home directory.  That's
what it's there for.  If a user needs to access all their settings (which
should of course just be dot files/directories in their home) from any
workstation, then simply move their home directory to a file server and mount
it with nfs or a sane modern equivalent.  .

Um.  Topic?  Oh yeah.  AFAICT, NT doesn't use any kind of directory service for
its (broken) profile fetching.  It just reads and writes from a networked
directory.  Sure it uses WINS and its browsing protocol to do name-to-IP
lookups, but we've got DNS for that, right?  So why exactly do you say
roaming users require a directory service?  What am I missing?

Nate
--
----------------------------------------------------------
nate cull  culln@xtra.co.nz  http://members.xoom.com/culln
Great Quotes of History:  "We hold these rights..."  
"I have a dream today..."  "That's one small step..."  
"I'm working on a free version of a Minix lookalike..." 
----------------------------------------------------------