[Samba] weird samba bug? some files from shares sometimes missing..

[Mitch Crane]

> Hello, well, i have a weird problem:
> i mounted a share, shared on winxp, on my gentoo linux box via mount -t
> smbfs.. everything seems to work - seems. When i started to backup files
> with rdiff-backup, i noticed that it reported about new and deleted
> files, yet those were never deleted and are still present on the source
> share on the windows machine. I thought it might be a bug in
> rdiff-backup, yet that is not the case, ls /share | wc reports very
> often 509, sometimes even 508, 507 and 506 files, even though there are
> 510 files in the directory on the share.
> Ok I thought, maybe a bug in a recent samba version or something - yet
> ive tried it on two gentoo machines, one using kernel 2.6/samba
> 3.0.1,gcc 3.3.2, and the other one kernel 2.4.23/samba 2.2.8a/gcc 3.2.3
> - and ive also tried it with another windows box, the result is the
> same. When i access the share via a windows box, it works ok and always
> shows 510 files.
> Each backup process, which checked about 40.000 files, only a few files
> were missing, so when you only check folders with only a few files you
> might not notice this at all..
> 
> I really hope someone can help me here, a backup with missing files aint
> really nice

I don't have anything that would help solve the problem, but it might be
helpful to know that you aren't alone.

My post to the list about it:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&selm=19
W2K-6UJ-11%40gated-at.bofh.it

Other similar reports:
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

It seems to be a problem on the Windows side--I've verified that my Windows
XP box is skipping files when sending directory listings--, but if I use a
smbclient command to retrieve a listing then there are no missing items, so
it also appears to be related to how the request is made from the Linux
side.

I looked into breaking my directory requests up into smaller chunks, but
anything with a wildcard in it seems to submit a search pattern of '\*'
which I suppose is then filtered on the client side.