[Samba] Missing Directory Entries (SMBFS)

[Mitch Crane]

Following up on this (please feel free to tell me if there is a more
appropriate place to post this info)...

My smbfs directory entries began to "show up missing" more frequently today,
so I ran ethereal on the Windows box and captured 2 directory listings. One
capture was of an ls of the directory which was complete and the other has a
missing entry.

What I found around the problem area was, a FIND_NEXT2 request from my Linux
box which resulted in 1 FIND_NEXT2 response and 2 NBSS continuation messages
containing the entry list up to the missing entry, then another FIND_NEXT2
requests whose response began after the missing entry. In other words, the
Windows machine never sent the directory entry for the missing item (it just
skipped over it), which implies a problem with the Windows (server) side.

>From what I can tell, the missing entry is always the entry which should
have been first in a FIND_NEXT2 response, so it's a problem of the
FIND_NEXT2 response sometimes being off by one file further into the search
than it should be.

Noting that I never get this problem with 'smbclient //server/share -U
user%pass -c dir' I captured one of those and I can see that the smbclient
dir command does things quite a bit differently. Since I know very little
about how the protocol works, I won't go into all the differences (which may
be irrelevant).

> -----Original Message-----
> 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.

[snip]

> 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.

[snip]

> What I know:
> 
> Directories with fewer items don't have this problem.
> The larger the directory, the more missing entries.