home and profiles are not available (SAMBA)

This document (3597565) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9

Situation

After an update of the PDC to Samba 3.0.24 Windows clients won't be able to access profiles and home and any other share.
In the logfiles of the PDC you will see entries with
smbd/msdfs.c
even so you never configured DFS to be used on this machine.
After an subsequent upgrade or downgrade to any other version some Windows Clients, for example W2003, still can't access profiles and home directories. Some other Clients, for example XP will work fine again.
A reboot of the Samba Server or restarting of the services will not change this behaviour. Also switching to another Samba Version will not fix this.

Resolution

Up or downgrade to another supported Samba Version from 3.0.24 and then reboot the affected Windows machine.

Additional Information

The reason for this is twofold:

First, with Samba 3.0.24 the setting of the "msdfs root" option was changed in the default settings to "yes". Versions before and after have this option set to "no". So the Server changes its behaviour by announcing to the clients that it supports "msdfs root". So this is the reason for the initial
smbd/msdfs.c
entries in the logfiles.

Second, unfortunately some Windows clients store this information and will not update the status of the share despite getting errors from the PDC. This is the reason why switching back to a formerly fine working Samba version will not fix this issue with some clients.

So the combination of the change of the default behaviour, from Samba, and the inability of some Clients to reread leads to a deadlock which can be fixed with the resolution outlined above.

Disclaimer

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