What is the case for preserving case under Samba ...

Richard Sharpe rsharpe at ns.aus.com
Sun Jul 7 23:43:01 GMT 2002


On Sun, 7 Jul 2002, Jay Ts wrote:

> At 3:24 PM -0700 7/7/02, Richard Sharpe wrote:
> >I want to preserve case sensitive behaviour for NFS and UNIX clients,
> >while reducing the current high cost to CIFS users of providing
> >case-insensitive behaviour.
> 
> You mean, you want case-sensitive clients to receive preserve-cased
> filenames, and non-case-sensitive clients to receive default-cased
> filenames ... correct?
> 
> That is, there are:
> 
> 	- local Unix processes, on the Samba host, and ...
> 	- NFS clients, which "want" the case to be preserved.
> 	- SMB/CIFS (and other) clients, which do not care about case
> 
> and that the idea here is to provide each with what works best for them.
> 
> Conrad Minshall wrote:
> >> Nice goal.
> 
> I agree. But, is it possible for Samba to determine which clients
> are which?  This would be necessary, or the administrator would
> have to set up smb.conf include files explicitly for each client
> on the network (which would not be a fun maintenance task!).

It's not really an issue for Samba. It is an issue for the file system. 
Samba is another client of the file system, and it would be nice for 
Samba to be able to say:

  Give me a case-preserving but non-case sensitive view of the file 
  system.

The problems that arise are how do you deal with:

  UNIX user creates file foo.txt
  CIFS client opens FOO.TXT and the file system maps that to foo.txt
  CIFS client uses the file and closes it.
  UNIX user now creates file FOO.TXT
  CIFS client opens FOO.TXT again. Which file does it get?

Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe at ns.aus.com, rsharpe at samba.org, 
sharpe at ethereal.com





More information about the samba-technical mailing list