Bug / Feature with Temporary Internet Files on a samba

[Jan Fenner]

Hi Everyone,

last night we had a strange problem, after testing some settings we
finally put the path for "Internet Explorer Internet Cache" du
x:\samba-server\xyz\cache.

Still anything was fine until we rebootet the windows machine. When it
was up again the x:\samba-server\xyz\cache path couldnt be access
anymore by IE.

Following happend, 50% of all directoris on the samba server was gone!
They still appeared by "ls -la" and you could access them through
windows if you know the exact path, but they where some kind of
hidden.

We checked everything, there were no differences between the invisible
and the visible directories, user rights etc were quite fine.

Next thing we found out was that somehow some cache files of the IE
had not been placed in x:\samba-server\xyz\cache\ but in
x:\samba-server\. I dont know if they were places there by the IE or
if samba mad a mistake managing those files.
We found 4 files, having the same name (some not displayable ascii
char) and the same size. a fifth file had the name "-" (only the
hyphen) and couldnt be opened by root/vi or windows/notepad.

After we deleted those files all hidden directories were visible
again, but all files in the root-sharing dir of smb
(x:\samba-server\*) were deleted.

Maybe anyone knows why this happend or can tell me what to do so it
doesnt happen again? :-)

Used versions:
Windows 2000 Prof.
Internet Explorer 5.00.2920.0000
Red Hat Linux release 7.0 (Guinness)
Kernel 2.2.16-22 on an i686
Samba Version 2.0.7
x:\samba-server\ = windows network drive like \\10.0.0.1\shares\


Regrades
Jan Fenner