[Samba] Samba limitation/configuration questions

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Sat, 2004-02-07 at 07:46, Jim Davee wrote:
> 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?

A filename may not end in a dot on windows.  Earlier versions of samba
had a 'strip dot' parameter, but this was incorrect (it had nasty
implications), and so we mangle these name in the same way we would any
other invalid name (such as a name with : in it).

> 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.

You need to set 'mangle method = hash2', or upgrade to Samba 3.0.  This
will change all the mangled names, so it can breaks things, but it is a
superior hash method, with far fewer collisions.

> 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.

This is interesting, and may be related to the name mangling problem I
mentioned above.

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
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