[linux-cifs-client] cifs mounted home directory problems

[Kenneth MacDonald]

I'm Cc'ing this to the evolution-hackers list in case anyone thinks this
is important enough from the application side.

>>>>> "Steve" == Steve French <smfrench at austin.rr.com> writes:

    >> The actual path is this: \.camel_certs\ba:aa:aa:aa:aa:aa etc.

    Steve> Arrgggghhh.  ':' is an invalid character in a cifs
    Steve> filename.  With one excpetion - presumably it could
    Steve> indicate a data stream (which Samba 3 would not support in
    Steve> any case) - in which case file file /.camel/ba would need
    Steve> to exist for the stream name after the : to make sense :)

    Steve> Presumably this is not some cross platform app that has
    Steve> some friendly configure option to work around illegal
    Steve> characters in file names right ...

It's Novell's Evolution email (groupware) client.  It creates lots of
files with : in the name.  It seems it turns /'s into _'s as I have
lots of
~/evolution/config/et-expanded-imap:__username at hostname_mailbox_folder
type filenames.

I found bug http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=16016 closed a
couple of years ago with a "it's a filesystem problem".

It seems the filename is sanitised by
gal/util/e-util.c:e_filename_make_safe(), which leaves colons in.  I
haven't dug deep enough to know whether it would be easy or hard to
migrate to filenames without colons.

The majority of our users home directories are on Windows servers so
"fixing" samba isn't sufficient for us unfortunately.

Cheers,

Kenny.

-- 
Desktop Services Team, EUCS.
University of Edinburgh, Scotland.