I have set up a new Ubuntu 9.10 system for five users. In the system is a large LVM volume where all the data is to be kept. The main system disk is not for this purpose, so I attempted to move the home directories using

usermod -d /var/data/username -m

And started creating my shares for these new home locations. But then I thought: hey, Samba has built-in home directory sharing! So I enabled that, and it didn't work. The shares were not published to the network. Only the share for user 'owen' was published; his folder hadn't been moved.

So I thought: maybe Samba home sharing only works for default home locations, so how about I move the home directories back to where they were, and then make them symlinks.

root@boxenmkiv:/home# ls -l
total 4
lrwxrwxrwx 1 brett brett   25 2010-04-03 08:48 brett -> /var/data/brett/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 carly carly   23 2010-04-03 08:48 carly -> /var/data/carly/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 dave  dave    21 2010-04-03 08:48 dave -> /var/data/dave/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 kate  kate    23 2010-04-03 08:47 kate -> /var/data/kate/
drwxr-xr-x 4 owen  owen  4096 2010-04-03 08:44 owen

Like so. Still no go. The only users share which is published to the network is 'owen' who as you can see above has not had his home directory moved.

I have also added the following to my smb.conf

[global]
   follow symlinks = yes
   wide symlinks = yes
   unix extensions = no

With no luck.

Am I going about doing this the entirely wrong way? Should I just give up and manually create shares for the users?

Thanks in advance.