[Samba] Missing Directory Entries (SMBFS)

[Mitch Crane]

SuSE 9.0 Pro - Kernel 2.4.21 - Samba 2.2.8a and 3.0.1-14

Here's my problem:

On a box runninng XP, I have a shared folder which contains 130+
subdirectories. This share is mounted on my linux box from '/etc/smbfstab',
but some directories do not show up in directory listings. It's never more
than one, and which one varies, but generally seems to be in or near the
last half of the listing. As a test, I can do 'ls -l | wc -l' and the number
will frequently be 1 less than it should be. The same test on a directory
with over 700 files in it I gave as many as 9 missing entries.

When I first noticed the problem I was running Redhat 9. Now I'm running
SuSE 9 and the problem persists. I've also tried Samba 3.0.1, but that
didn't seem to make any difference.

I'm guessing this is an issue with smbfs mounts, because I can do
'smbclient //some-server/blah -U user%pass -c dir' and I don't get any
missing directories or files.

Here appear to be similar reports, but no solutions:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=samba&m=102458988807544&w=2
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9603.1/0579.html
http://marc.free.net.ph/message/20030811.020338.5e7083b5.html
http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2002-November/025587.html

Some of the above reports are pretty old which makes me wonder why more
people haven't run into the problem or if there's some kind of weird system
combinations which cause it.

What I know:

Directories with fewer items don't have this problem.
The larger the directory, the more missing entries.

Update:

I actually wrote this a few days ago and never sent it because through my
twiddling the problem mysteriously vanished (or so I thought). Now I find
that it's still happening, but much more rarely than before. I stopped some
Norton Antivirus related services on the Windows machine and then (after
that didn't help) I restarted them and I also did a Norton update. Maybe
it's related to NAV activity on the XP box, but I can't say for certain. Now
that it happens so infrequently it's difficult to even test.

So I'm just wondering if anyone else has seen this kind of thing and looking
for advice.