I have two Debian systems [1] at the house for my kids. I am trying to make them as Windows like as possible for my kids. For my actual Windows machines, they do domain logins and have roaming profiles with network directories and storage from a third linux machine running Samba. That works great had has been for years, but what is the best way to get similar functionality with the Debian machines? I mounted the non user specific shares via smbfs in fstab and created links to them in thier home directories, this works fine because they are read-only and permissions are not an issue. How can I mount or link their user specific Windows home directories from Samba automatically like \\server\homes and maintain the proper permissions? Although possible, I could NFS mount the entire /home partition as the /home on the debian systems as I already have a common Linux home that I share between other Linux machines (all users and groups id's match across all Linux machines) but since they do not actually use these machine directly, I never had a need to integrate the Samba shares into them. Is their a potential for NFS and Samba clashing on open files and file locking bewtween the Linux machines on NFS and the Windows machines on SMB?. I don't know. My goal here are things like Bookmarks and the "My Documents" folders. It would nice to have user specific common directories accessible from all the machines where they can put their files to have available anywhere.
[1] My Debian machines they use came from Knoppix, the live CD distro, I liked what they offered and converted them to hardrive format from the live cd (Knoppix includes scripts for this). They work great with the exception of Windows games but they do 95% of what they need and they like them. I like them because they are no longer getting infested with Spyware and IE hijacking software that my kids always seem to download. They are only P200's/256MB ram but they still work fine and about the same speed as when Win98 was on them. I was already using IMAP in the house so email conversion is not an issue. The only standing issues are the CUPS printing to my Intel Netport does nothing and the above mention of dealing with the SMB shares. If you want to try Linux, I highly suggest the newest live CD Knoppix release from www.knoppix.net.