Users can also have
mandatory profiles, which are roaming profiles that they cannot change. For example, with a mandatory profile, if a user adds a command to the Start Menu on Tuesday, it will be gone when he or she logs in again on Wednesday. The mandatory profile is simply a
user.dat file that has been renamed to
user.man and made read-only on the Unix server. It normally contains settings that the administrator wishes to ensure the user always executes. For example, if an administrator wants to create a fixed user configuration, he or she can do the following:
-
Create the read-write directory on the Samba server.
-
Set the
logon
path option in the
smb.conf file to point to this directory.
-
Logon as the user from Windows 95/98 to have the client populate the directory.
-
Rename the resulting
user.dat to
user.man.
-
Make the directory and its contents read only.
Mandatory profiles are fairly unusual. Roaming profiles, on the other hand, are one of the more desirable features of Windows that Samba can support.
