[PATCH] Add support for setting owner info, dos attributes, and create time

[Jeremy Allison]

On Mon, Jan 13, 2020 at 01:26:39PM -0700, Andreas Dilger via samba-technical wrote:
> On Jan 9, 2020, at 12:10 PM, Steve French <smfrench at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > One loosely related question ...
> > 
> > Your patch adds the ability to set creation time (birth time) which
> > can be useful for backup/restore cases, but doesn't address the other
> > hole in Linux (the inability to restore a files ctime).
> > 
> > In Linux the ability to set timestamps seems quite limited (utimes
> > only allows setting mtime and atime).
> 
> The whole point of not being able to change ctime and btime as a regular
> user is so that it is possible to determine when a file was actually
> created on the filesystem and last modified.  That is often useful for
> debugging or forensics reasons.
> 
> I think if this is something that SMB/CIFS wants to do, it should save
> these attributes into an xattr of its own (e.g. user.dos or whatever),
> rather than using the ctime and btime(crtime) fields in the filesystem.

FYI, we (Samba) already do this for create time to store/fetch it
on systems and filesystems that don't store a create time. It's
easy to add extra info here.