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

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

For the admin user only, the v2 profile folder is created automatically. 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

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