[Samba] What's happening to "strip dot"?

[Andrew Bartlett]

James Wilkinson wrote:
> 
> Hello, all you happy people.
> 
> I notice from the 2.2.5 release notes that the "strip dot" parameter
> has been deprecated. I haven't been able to find out why it has been
> deprecated: was no-one else using it? Is there some architectural
> reason why it's being dropped?

It was the wrong solution to the problem.

> We use Samba 2.2 on an IBM RS/6000 running AIX. This machine is the
> principal database server for the company: the users telnet or ssh
> in to run programs against it. This means that we are using Samba to
> access existing Unix files, not as a drop-in NAS device to replace an
> NT box.
> 
> Some of these files end in a dot (e.g. a directory called "U.S.A.").
> Without the "strip dot" functionality, it is very difficult to access
> the files in this directory. These names are based on key fields in
> the database, which makes them difficult to change.

Names ending in a '.' are mangled, in the same way any other illigal
filename in mangled.  Hopefully (and I've not looked at this particular
one closely) this means that the 'long' filename used by applications is
still 'U.S.A.' but that the 8.3 restricted parts of the protocol use a
'valid' dos name.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet at pcug.org.au
Manager, Authentication Subsystems, Samba Team  abartlet at samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet at hawkerc.net
http://samba.org     http://build.samba.org     http://hawkerc.net