xcopy failures; SAMBA digest 1784

[Jim Mulholland]

I had a simular problem in a single server (unix) environment with PC
clients although we were using NFS stack for drive maps. The issue is
came down to this: a MS-DOS pathspec cannot exceed 64 characters, with
the pathspec looking something like 
'server_name:\directory\dir...\...\filename.ext". Your NT and Samba
systems are probably selected a SMB protocol like Core Plus or LAN Man
1.0, or some other SMB protocol that has this MS-DOS limitation.  Sorry
that I cant find the MS Technical document ID that supports this; but
you can spend a day or two and look it up at MS's internet site.

Although I used xcopy for migrating disks I have never found it
desirable to use. One slip and XCOPY does not copy hidden files or it
misses special permission files. I recommend the following alternatives:

Copy files between systems:
    GNU tar for wintel - Free, fast, reliable and can use compressed
files on the fly to save disk space.

Burn-in systems:
    Ghost (http://www.ghost.com/) - Very Fast, uses compressed files on
the fly and well worth its modest price ($10 per system). We can burn in
a workstation with a 300MB NT image in under 20 minutes! Ghost can also
be used to migrate NT systems to a larger disk drives.

Hope this helps.

>Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1998 08:36:11 -0700
>From: "Sudarsan Varadan" <sudarsan.varadan at wang.com>
>To: <samba at samba.anu.edu.au>
>Subject: xcopy failures
>Message-ID: <000001bdcabd$ed72b7f0$b66ebd81 at cbinfrasv.olsy-na.com>
>
>
>Hi
>
>       I had sent a mail about a week ago regarding a xcopy problem I had.  I am
>trying to copy an image of an nt workstation from an unixware 2.1.3 server
>running samba 1.9.18p8.  Initially the client is a dos client, who connects
>to the unixware server and downloads files using xcopy.  My problem after
>copying a certain number of files xcopy fails with path not found.   On
>further investigation I figured out that this happens if the number of
>characters in the directory structure exceeds 48 characters  i.e xcopy
>c:\aa\a\a\a\aa\a\a\a\a\....... , I never used to have this problem when I
>was using netbeui as my protocol.  Since I changed to samba for my lan
>needs, I have to use the tcp-ip stack.  Can anyone out there please help me
>out with this.  Thanks in advance.
>
>
>Sonny Varadan
>