Our more serious issue: two kinds of Samba read corruption

[BG - Ben Armstrong]

Hi,

While we're all stirred up about improving Samba, I thought I should
alert you to a more serious issue with the current implementation of
Samba for OpenVMS (2.2.8 release 20040908).  We have been seeing two
different kinds of file corruption that so far, JYC has been unable to
reproduce.  I'm wondering if anyone here has experienced anything
similar, and more importantly, I need help making the real cause of the
problem visible so we can get to the bottom of it and have it fixed,
since it is having a bigger impact on us than the write performance
issue.

We have been noticing that using MS Wordpad, COPY, or other means to
read the contents of a file, most of the time the file is successfully
retrieved, but sometimes it returns empty.  This happens on a fairly
regular basis, so with proper direction, we ought to be able to "catch
it in the act" and report more details here.  So, what should we be
looking for?  Should our log levels be elevated, and if so, how high?
Is there anything else we can do to make this problem more visible?

I have also observed the same problem opening a file with Vim on Linux.
Unfortunately, I forget now whether this was with Vim doing the read
directly, or using a wrapper which copies the file to /tmp first, and
then opens it.  What may be significant is that to my recollection, what
happened was Vim first showed an empty file, then Vim detected that the
file on the filesystem had changed and prompted me to reload it, at
which point I said "Yes" and the file was loaded intact.  I have been
unable to reproduce the problem since that time, however.

The other issue is the one my colleague Rod Regier raised yesterday:

Subject: Bug report (12=17020 TC029) SAMBA 2.2.8 release 20040908 -
         intermittent content loss

As noted in that report, originally we thought the problem was
confined to certain Perl scripts that opened multiple files.  But with
the recent discovery of the same symptoms in Araxis Merge (which we use
to show a visual diff of two source code files) it seems to be a more
general problem.  It's anyone's guess as to whether this is related to
the first problem or not.

Thanks,
Ben