Short (MS-DOS) names compatibility with NT

[Francois Gouget]

On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, Andrej Borsenkow wrote:

> It may be not a problem, but if I remember it correctly, SAMBA should build the
> short names the same as NT

	This is unfortunately impossible to do without cooperation from
the underlying Unix filesystem.
	NT stores both the long and the short name on the filesystem be 
it VFAT or NTFS. Unix filesystems do not make any provision for storing 
a short name so Samba has to dynamically generate a short name that fits
the bill.

	I only see two alternatives to the current solution:

 - modify the Unix filesystem (ext2fs, ffs, the solaris filesystem, ...)
so that we can store a short name. This is both practically unfeasible
and unacceptable.

 - use a technique 'a la' UMSDOS, i.e. store the association between the
long and the short name in a per directory file. Performance would
certainly suffer but it would be feasible as UMSDOS demonstrates it
(UMSDOS solves the opposite problem: i.e. storing Unix specific
information, including long names, on a filesystem that supports
neither).


[...]
> is Explorer context menu, the MS-DOS name is shown by NT as
> 
> 49A6E~1.0-R
> 
> and by SAMBA as
> 
> 4~%E.0-R

	This is a bit strange for a short name: it is too short, the
part before the '.' should have 8 characters. If this is really the name
you got it should probably be investigated. 


--
Francois Gouget    fgouget at multimania.com    http://www.multimania.com/fgouget

                  In a world without fences who needs Gates?