Samba 3, ACLs, and 'chowning' files

[Ronan Waide]

Hi folks,

tooling around with server cloning here, I'm experimenting with a
variety of tools to preserve permissions and ACLs across the
cloning. I've got some eval software called "BX", something else
called "sectools", and smbacls from Samba. The admin user on the NT
Network is listed as a domain admin on the Samba server, other users
mapped in through winbind. The Samba shares all live on an ext3
filesystem with ACLs and Extended Attributes enabled. I'm seeing some
oddly inconsistent behaviour with changing file ownerships:

  BX: fails to set file ownership when copying, failing on the chown
      operation with "Error 5: permission denied"

  smbcacls: quietly fails to change ownership, but does have an exit
      return code of 2

  sectools: this is the odd one. There's two means of chowning files:
      there's a pair of tools to save and restore full ACLs, and
      there's a setowner tool which just does the chown. The ACL tools
      fail with "permission denied", while the setowner tool works
      perfectly.

So I guess I'm wondering how it is that only one of the above tools
can chown files successfully, while the rest fail in various ways. On
top of which I'm fairly certain I've got Samba set up correctly to
allow arbitrary chowning - the setowner tool seems to verify that -
but BX, smbcacls and restacl seem unable to take advantage of this.

Cheers,
Waider.
-- 
waider at waider.ie / Yes, it /is/ very personal of me.
"operating complicated machinery when possessed of the cognitive powers of a
 sea slug and the disposition of a polar bear with a toothache is most unwise."
                                   - John Walker, _The Hacker's Diet_