Roaming profiles are feared by some, hated by a few, loved by many, and a godsend for some administrators.

Roaming profiles allow an administrator to make available a consistent user desktop as the user moves from one machine to another. This chapter provides much information regarding how to configure and manage roaming profiles.

While roaming profiles might sound like nirvana to some, they are a real and tangible problem to others. In particular, users of mobile computing tools, where often there may not be a sustained network connection, are often better served by purely local profiles. This chapter provides information to help the Samba administrator deal with those situations.