preallocated file size

[Terry McCoy]

I have noticed the following behavior when copying a new
large file (1.9 GB) from a NT 4.0 client to a share on a 
Samba server.  While the copy is in progress an listing of
the destination directory on the Samba server shows that the
file is in the directory with the allocated size of 1.9GB.

It would appear that perhaps the file is being created and
a seek ahead is being done, then the process of coping the
file over from the client to the server is begun.  Hence a
method to preallocate disk space for the new file.

My question(s)

    Why is this being done?

    Is there an configuration option to turn this behavior off?

    If it can't be turned off what location(s) in the source is this
    behavior being implemented.


The real problem I am having is that, I believe this behavior as
observed on shares that are local file systems on the Samba server
are the cause of problems I am having when the share is not a local
file system on the Samba server but an distributed network file
system.


Other information:
 
  Samba server version 2.0.5a, on a Sun E2 running Solaris 2.6



--
Terry McCoy                             email:  terry at nd.edu
Sr Systems Engineer                     phone:  (219) 631-4274
Enterprise Systems Software
Office of Information Technologies
University of Notre Dame