[Samba] Samba limitation/configuration questions

[Jim Davee]

I hope you can help us.  We've created a few Samba shares (v2.x) on an HP-UX
11 server and are mounting the shares from a Windows 2003 server.  Generally
it's OK, but we're having a issues and would like to know if they are known
problems, limitations, or errors on our part with the configuration.

1. Files that end in "." (a dot) are producing short-name displays on
Windows such as "filen~12" instead of "filename.".  When we remove the dot
as the last character of the file name, the Windows display works properly
and shows the long name.  Why would an ending dot produce this behavior?

2. Possibly related to the dot name, in the same folder I have dozens of
empty folders.  No names, no sizes, no content.  Just folders.  I suspect
that they're a byproduct of the dot problem but I've not tested to be sure.
So far, only one folder has these empties in it, and that one has the dot
file names.

3. Windows Explorer and file pick events in other apps that use Explorer
(such as UltraEdit) only report the first 400-500 files, not all files in
the directory.  In one extreme case I have an archive directory with over
25,000 files (I don't like it either, but I also didn't design the
archive...).  Under Windows Explorer, I can only see the first 420 or so,
and these are always the oldest files.  It gives the false impression that
new files are not in the directory.  But if I do a Search on "files created
in the last week", I'll get all of the files from the last week.

4. Windows Search on Content is failing.  To test, we searched on a common
element within the files in a share directory (they're all EDI text files).
Windows Search could find nothing, DOS FIND found a handful.  But the
WinGrep utility found everything.  Why would Windows Search work on file
dates (as discussed above) but not on file content?

I also did a search for all files in the dot file directory.  The search
never stopped by itself.  I manually stopped it and it reported tens of
thousands of files, way more than the 757 that were actually in the
directory.


Thanks for any help or suggestions you can offer!

Jim