Windows Explorer dir refresh and change notifications

[Raghavendra Talur]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2016 at 2:39 PM, Volker Lendecke <vl at samba.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Nov 08, 2016 at 09:56:51AM +0200, Uri Simchoni wrote:
> > It seems that in Windows (at least Win7), if you have an explorer window
> > open on a directory, then propagation of changes depends on a working
> > change-notify mechanism.
> >
> > I used to think you only need change-notify for the window to be
> > refreshed *automatically*, but it seems like even hitting F5 doesn't
> > show new files (for a varying time in the order of one minute), if
> > change notify doesn't work (as with the case of a FUSE file system
> > without change notify support).
> >
> > Is anyone familiar with this? Is it an Explorer behavior or a redirector
> > behavior? Can anything be done short of fixing change-notification?
>
> I can confirm I've seen that. Working change notify seems mandatory
> for the Windows Explorer application these days. I do not know about
> any client-side workaround.
>
> Volker


We have seen that too. The following is the summary that Michael
arrived at when we debugged the issue.


It seems that in at least in some versions of win7 and win8, there is
a bug with smb2 notify in combination with oplocks.

with win7 (unpatched) we could repro the issue against samba 4.2
but using SMB1 the issue went away
using SMB 2.1 and turning off oplocks, the issue was not there either
using SMB 2.1 and enabling smb2 leases, the issue was not there either
with windows 2012r2, (~ win 8.1) the issue was never seen.


You could try turning off oplocks OR turning on smb2 leases as a workaround.

Thanks,
Raghavendra Talur