Time resolution on stored files?

Chris Watt cnww at chebucto.ns.ca
Fri Jun 23 02:17:19 GMT 2000


At 12:32 AM 23/06/00 +1000, Randolph S. Kahle wrote:

>Has anyone else run into this problem? What is the solution?

I have had a fair number of timestamp related problems with Samba, in my
experience they are usually due to disagreement between the client and
server clocks. Worse yet SMB time synchronization is just designed to sync.
the clock as a single event when explicitly asked for; the machines
invariably drift out of sync again fairly quickly unless other steps are
taken.

My solution was to set the Samba server up as a tier 3 NTP server (using
the xntpd package, but you can grab any NTP server daemon you like) and
install a freeware NTP client (Automachron from www.oneguycoding.com is
small & stable) pointed at the Samba server on every Windows box where this
became an issue.

I do not know if this will have any bearing on your particular situation
though, since I was only interested in getting the timestamps correct,
whereas it sounds like your backup system may want to explicitly set the
last-modified time on files it's writing to an incorrect value (IMHO it is
more likely that it just doesn't change the last-modified time when it is
copying the file, in which case clock disagreement could well be the problem).

Also have a look at the man page for smb.conf where it references the options:
	dos filetimes
	dos filetime resolution
which may be worth playing with.
--

Q:      What's tiny and yellow and very, very, dangerous?
A:      A canary with the super-user password.



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