Further to Problems with offline files and Explorer 'hangs'

[David Collier-Brown]

A bit of spec-grovelling didn't turn up any elegant and inexpensive
ways to see if files were offline, short of opening them
and/or doing ioctl(fd, <extended attribute stuff>) on them.

 Let me throw out a possibility: we be able to set, via smb.conf
	1) a static offline=yes attribute for a share, and/or
        2) a dynamic offline=<mechanism script> attribute,
           also for a whole share, and/or possibly
	3) a globbing offline=/pattern/ attribute

  I'll suggest that, if it is a credible thing to do, we return
the offline attribute when asked for information about such files,
but just try to open them when asked.
  If the file is not offline, the open will succeed normally.
  If the file is offline, the client will be paused until it
becomes online and the smbd continues.

  The slowness in accessing offline files will arguably be 
understood by users ("sorry, we had to mount the tape"),
although some will be technically aware enough to ask about
additional threads, either in Samba (no!) or Windows (maybe).

  If a portable mechanism appears, we could adopt it instead
of passing a script path.

--dave