[Samba] File Creation Dates Question

[Mike McMullen]

Hi Joel,

Replies below...

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joel Hammer" <Joel at HammersHome.com>
To: "Mike McMullen" <mlm at loanprocessing.net>; <samba at lists.samba.org>
Sent: Sunday, January 19, 2003 3:12 PM
Subject: Re: [Samba] File Creation Dates Question


> I just ran
>
> for i in `find . -maxdepth 1 -perm 000`
> do
> touch $i
> chmod 777 $i
> done
>
> on a directory with 1700 files. It found, touch'ed, and chmod'ed 17 files
> with 000 permissions in less than one second on an AMD 267 mh.
>
> find is an executable binary, not some slow perl or bash script.
> So, it may not be too great a burden on your cpu to run this find command
> every minute.

Well, it's up to 1000 new files a day with roughly 90-120 days worth
of active files before they are archived so you'd be looking at around
60,000 - 90,000 file timestamps to be checked every minute. The server
does lots of other stuff and it seems like a waste of CPU to go through
all of that.

>
> The inability of samba to automatically change the access times of
uploaded
> files sounds like a feature, not a bug!

I'm not certain this is an issue with samba. It may be how smb/cifs works.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that when I make a copy of a file, the
copy should have a timestamp of  when it was created, not when the original
file was created. If this was simply moving the file then I'd expect the
original timestamp to stay.

>
> Joel
>

Thank you for your efforts,

Mike

>
>
> On Sun, Jan 19, 2003 at 01:31:21PM -0800, Mike McMullen wrote:
> > Hi Joel,
> >
> >
> > > I lost my email from Saturday.  File corruption.
> > >
> > > Anyway, if you responded to my suggestion of running a script to solve
> > > your file access time problems I didn't see it.
> > >
> > > Joel
> > >
> >
> > Below is what I sent.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Mike
> >
> >
> > Hi Joel,
> >
> > I had already set dos filetimes=yes. I still see
> > the same behavior. As a test I tried copying a
> > file from one pc to another pc. The file creation
> > timestamp on the copy retains the original file
> > creation time.
> >
> > Seems like a strange behavior to me. The reason
> > I'm a little loathe to run a find every minute is this could
> > very soon be up to a thousand files a day or more.
> >
> > The group effected the most by this is our scanning and
> > indexing folks. They take paper files and TIFF format
> > faxes received, break them into individual documents, index
> > them according to document type and drop them into directories
> > where the assigned loan processor can view them.
> >
> > Every 5 minutes a small script runs and using find walks
> > the file system to see what's been added. If new documents
> > have been found, an HTML email is sent to the loan processor
> > and those who have access to that loan, to inform them of
> > documents to review.
> >
> > One solution would be to have the indexor touch the files
> > before they are filed which would give a correct time stamp.
> >
> > It just seems there should be a setting to say give me a new
> > timestamp, not keep the old timestamp.
> >
> > Thanks for your help,
> >
> > Mike
> >
> > Mike McMullen
> >
> > CIO - Baton, Inc.
> >
> > 7637 Fair Oaks Blvd Suite #2
> > Carmichael, CA 95608
> >
> > Tel:      1-866-515-4421 or 916-944-7790 ext. 2
> > Fax:     1-866-843-8795 or 916-944-8422
> > Email:  mlm at loanprocessing.net
> > Web:   www.loanprocessing.net
> >
> > "From chaos comes true genius..."
> >
>