Documentation on Handling Long Share Names

[Green, Paul]

"Deniz Akkus Kanca" <deniz at arayan.com> asked:

> 1. Share names longer than 13 characters are cheerfully accepted by Win2K
> clients but rejected by WinNT clients. I understand this is a somewhat
> oldish issue. Is there any progress I can look forward to?

I ran into this problem when I ported Samba 2.0.7 to the Stratus VOS
operating system. Usernames on VOS can be up to 32 bytes long. When the
Samba administrator defines a "homes" share name, an attempt to list the
shares shows the long name. If the client is using NT 4.0, he or she can
list the long share name using NT Explorer but cannot use it. However, other
methods will work.  Here are the instructions I wrote for our support team.
I looked under samba/docs to see where I might add this information, but I
couldn't see an obvious place to record it. If someone would please suggest
a home for this information, I'll try to submit a patch that adds it to the
right document. Or I'm happy to donate the info to anyone who can then make
the patch themselves.  When you see the word "VOS" below think "Unix" or
"Linux"; we're just another host OS here. (Oh, and in case it is not
obvious, this is a bug in NT4 Explorer and there is nothing Samba can do
about it).

Symptom:	User with a VOS user name longer than 12 characters gets
"PATHNAME is not accessible. The network name cannot be found." error when
navigating to his VOS home directory with Explorer on Microsoft Windows NT
4.0.

				Same symptom happens when a user on NT4.0
tries to access any share name that is longer than 12 characters or contains
a space.

Cause:		The NT4.0 Explorer does not handle NetBIOS share names
longer than 12 characters.

Resolution:	(1) Use Map Network Drive to map \\MACHINE\homes to a free
disk drive.

 		(2) Use the DOS command "NET USE * \\MACHINE\homes
/persistent:yes" to map the directory to the next free drive.

 		(3) Use the DOS command "NET USE * \\MACHINE\NTUSERNAME
/persistent:yes" to map the directory to the next free drive.  The
NTUSERNAME will be mapped to the VOS user name (if necessary) by using the
VOS /system/samba/username_map file.

 		(4) Upgrade the client machine to Windows 2000.

Source:		Stratus, Microsoft KB Q145949
<http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q145/9/49.asp>

Thanks
PG
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Paul Green
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