Windows 7 Support

	Skill level: medium
	The instructions on this page require a basic knowledge of linux.

	Warning:
	This howto is based upon limited testing and may cause SME Server to experience issues when updating and/or upgrading to version 8 upon release. You should only use these instructions if Windows 7 support is critical for your environment.

Author

David Harper

Background

Windows 7 was released in October 2009. Due to changes in the way that trust relationships are established with domain controllers, older versions of Samba do not allow Windows 7 clients to log in once joined to a domain.

Although an upstream fix was made available for SME 8 beta (based on CentOS 5, see bug 5425), there is no comparable fix available from the upstream vendor for SME 7.x (based on CentOS 4).

Adding Windows 7 Support

Thanks to SerNet, SME 7 users can now install an updated version of Samba which fixes the domain trust issues.

Installation

• Add the SerNet repository for CentOS 4.x

db yum_repositories set SerNet repository \
 BaseURL http://ftp.sernet.de/pub/samba/3.5/centos/4 \
 EnableGroups yes \
 GPGCheck no \
 Name 'SerNet Samba Team packages (CentOS 4)' \
 Visible yes \
 status enabled
signal-event yum-modify

• Update SME Server - the new Samba packages will install automatically.

yum update
signal-event post-upgrade ; signal-event reboot

Configuring Clients

• Install the Windows 7 registry patch from http://yourserver/server-resources/
• Add the client machine to the domain as normal.

	Note:
	You may see an error message on join regarding primary DNS suffix. This doesn't seem to affect any actual functionality

• Log in as the 'admin' user for the first time.

	Note:
	You may see an error message when logging in for the first time. This appears to be a once off timeout issue which does not recur.

Roaming Profiles

Windows 7 clients require that a version 2 profile folder exist in the profiles$ share, which on SME Server is located in /home/e-smith/files/samba/profiles

	Note:
	If you attempt to log in to a Windows 7 client with an account which does not yet have a corresponding .V2 profile folder, a temporary profile will be created. No settings will be saved to the server until the .V2 folder is created.

Any new users you add will automatically be given this additional folder, see bug 5423.

For existing users, you will need to add the folder manually:

cd /home/e-smith/files/samba/profiles
mkdir <myuser>.v2
chown -R <myuser>.<myuser> <myuser>.v2
chmod -R 700 <myuser>.v2

Replace <myuser> with each user account name in turn.

For the admin user only, the v2 profile folder is created automatically when logging in to a client machine. In this case, you should secure the folder to prevent unauthorised access by other users:

cd /home/e-smith/files/samba/profiles
chown -R admin.admin admin.v2
chmod -R 700 admin.v2

Source Code

SerNet publishes the source code for their latest Samba build at http://ftp.sernet.de/pub/samba/3.5/src/rpm/

Code for older builds is also available at http://ftp.sernet.de/pub/samba/old/src/rpm/

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