[Samba] Problems with lower and uppercase filenames

[Barzilai Spinak]

Wieprecht, Karen M. wrote:

>I note some distinctions here:
>
>The tools you had trouble with were NT tools,  and the problem didn't exist
>with all of them.  NT is not case sensitive,  and so developers of the
>various tools and utilities probably handle character case differently.  I'm
>betting that it's the utility you are using that is deciding to make the
>file name upper case (file copy, by default, calls the output "COPY OF
>FOO.TXT" and probably doesn't try to preserve the case of the original file
>name,  notepad may also throw away any lower case letters ... Etc.)  You
>should try these same tests without going through the loopback to make sure
>you understand what behavior is introduced by the utility itself .vs. what
>might be getting introduced when you throw samba into the mix.  If the
>behavior is the same in both cases,  I'd blame the NT utility,  not the file
>sharing method.  
>  
>
Karen:
As I better explained on a second post, this behaviour doesn't happen 
when the same "problematic" Windows
programs are writing to a samba share which is a *real* linux directory 
(i.e., it's not a samba share that is in turn
smbmounted back to a windows share)
So, in sum:
[Windows]---->[ [samba]---->[linux filesystem] ]         works OK
[linux]---->[smbmount]---->[ [windows cifs]---->[Windows filesystem] ]   
 works OK


[Windows]---->[ [samba]---->[smbmount] ]---->[ [windows 
cifs]---->[Windows filesystem] ]     DOESN'T ALWAYS!!!!


see the strange behaviour?
I'm puzzled I didn't get more replies on this subject, is there another 
better list to ask about this?
A samba developer's list maybe?

thanks Karen

Barzilai

 > Wieprecht, Karen M. wrote:

>You are still adding two instances of Windows into the mix,  and I am
>betting money that some piece of the windows file sharing combined with
>certain utilities is ignoring case.
>
>Try the same tests with [Windows]---->[ [windows cifs]---->[Windows
>filesystem] ]    without going through a UNIX/linux system and see if the
>same utilities convert to upper case in the same places.  If so,  it's
>probably not your configuration that is at fault,  but simply the
>differences in the way programmers decided to pass on or ignore case in the
>various NT utilities.  
>
>Karen Wieprecht


Tried that. As expected, windows talking to windows behaves normally.
And as I said, windows talking to samba works normally.
linux talking to smbmount (with a windows target) works normally
windows talking to samba talking to [linux talking to] smbmount (with a windows target).. that's the ugly beast!

The few replies I'v gotten make me think that
a) I'm not explaining the problem correctly
b) Nobody has a clue
c) Nobody cares

Anyone else has ideas???

Barzilai