ServingWindowsWithSamba - Canterbury School Technology

Serving Windows Clients with a Samba Server

We serve 500 client machines (1000 users) with 2 Samba file/print servers running Gentoo Linux. We find it faster, more reliable, and certainly cheaper than running Windows. The main trade-off is the configuration time and expertise required.

File Sharing (Samba)

Printing (Samba & CUPS)

We've found CUPS printing to work pretty well with Samba, although it certainly has its moments. We use all RAW queues and LPD printing, since we've had problems trying to get the native CUPS drivers working. We find that keeping the paradigm consistent helps with reliability. After setting up the printer on the network, we set a queue up in CUPS using "lynx http://localhost:631". For some reason, I've had problems logging in to do administrative tasks using Firefox. I can manage the print queues from there and set up printers.

To do Point & Print, we log in to a Windows machine as a printer admin (as defined in /etc/samba/smb.conf), then select Printers & Faxes, right-click the printer, click Properties (say NO if it asks if you want to install a driver - it's asking about a LOCAL driver), then click the Advanced tab and select a new driver from there. This will upload the driver automatically to Samba (on the PRINT$ share), so you can have your clients automatically download the driver as needed (experience would show that we don't want users to even have to know what a driver is).

The problem we're still having is with some inkjets, the devmode string (the binary string that defines the default options) gets corrupted and we can't seem to get it reset (even by changing from portrait to landscape and applying the changes. I'd welcome any light somebody could shed on that problem.

Login Scripts

PrinterScripts - example VBS script we run on Windows clients at login. This script looks at the machine name and selects a printer based on that. FirstPrinter is the one that will be set to default. Second and Third are also added as options.

RegistryEntries - various entries that make things perform more cleanly for users

User Profiles

Instead of using roaming profiles, which copies a bunch of extra things (like IE Cache files, etc.) to the local machine every time a user logs in, we simply remap the registry keys to point to an appropriate folder in the user's home directory (H:\). While this lacks the potential gains from a local cache of the files (if the network goes down), in this day and age, the network is reliable enough to make it work well even on inexpensive hardware, it makes system administration easier, and there aren't local copies of everything stored on everyone's machines! In a small school where potentially 300 different users could use a machine over the course of a year, it's very conceivable to run out of hard drive space, just from all the local profiles.

Misc.

ProblemsAndSolutions - Misc. things we ran into while setting up Samba & CUPS, and how we fixed them

References

Serving Windows clients with Samba

Default User Profiles

samba.org - See Docs and Books for a LARGE amount of documentation about Samba

PXE Booting Knoppix for troubleshooting/imaging (we use partimage)

WSName - David Clarke's EXTREMELY handy utility for automatically naming/renaming machines based on a database of MAC Addresses, serial numbers/service tags or other options]

NLite - A deployment tool for creating customizing Windows installations (actually modifies the Windows installation so you can create customized Windows CDs with your preferences & installation answers built-in)

Unattended - A system for fully automating the installation of Windows & Windows applications

Wiki for Unattended - Includes some helpful info on automating installations (even if not using the Unattended system)

We welcome links to other relevant pages or other information you'd like to submit about your experiences:

Email: Jeremy Nelson