toupper case grief with Windows NT5 Beta 2 and Samba1.9.18p10-51.

Andrew Tridgell tridge at samba.anu.edu.au
Thu Sep 24 15:39:50 GMT 1998


> I was fairly succesful with:
>    case sensitive = yes

that is normally not a good idea, unless you know that all your
applications handle a case sensitive filesystem. (case sensitivity is
largely a application issue, not a OS issue. many apps change case
arbitrarily) 

> and created "junk", "JUNK", and "JuNk" files that explorer shows as
> "junk", "Junk" (explorer convention for display of all uppercase names,
> and "JuNk" as expected).  However, NT 4's matcher doesn't always get
> the correct match the first time depending on what is in the directory
> cache.  This is something that the NFS on NT solutions solved!

first off, find out if what you are trying to do works with a NT->NT
connection over SMB. If it does then Samba can probably be made to do
the same thing. If it doesn't then it is quite likely a client issue
(and thus something we can't do anything about).

> Note: with "case sensitive = no", you can't create the 3 varients
> from NT on the SAMBA share, so it doesn't come close to an NFS
> solution in exposing a full Unix file system name space.

the reason we default to "case sensitive = no" is that many apps can't
handle it otherwise. If you look witha sniffer at what common apps
(such as ms office) do you will find that they change the case of
files before sending the names back to the server. That makes it
impossible for it to work right with many apps no matter what Samba
does.
 
> NT 5 Beta 2 touppers everything with either of the above configurations;
> however, NT 5 and NT 4 play together without this grief using SMB.

that is interesting. If NT->NT over SMB does what you want then we can
probably make Samba do the same. You'll need to start using a SMB
sniffer (such as tcpdump-smb) to work out what is different about how
Samba and NT handle things. 

Note that the sniffs will be quite different (because NT will use
unicode) but I doubt this is the cause of the problem. unicode and
case sensitivity should be orthogonal issues.

Hmmm, I wonder if any apps look at the file system type (the fstype
string) to determine case behaviour? Might be worth trying with
FSTYPE_STRING set to "NTFS".

Cheers, Tridge


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