[Samba] Preventing deletion of folders under a SAMBA share

[Stuart Callender]

I am trying to set up a basic Samba server and configure it so that
folders under a share cannot be deleted accidentally by a user.  The
ideal scenario would be to have the top-level folders under the share
non-deleteable, but folders and files are able to be created under it.

I cannot find any easy way of doing this directly, but thought that the
use of the 'veto' option would work nicely, by just populating each main
top-level folder with a pre-named hidden file (ie. .do_not_remove), then
setting veto files = /*.remove/.  The theory of this would keep the main
folder structure intact.  However this option seems to be ignored by
Samba 3 and Windows 2000.  Windows 2000 will quite happily delete
read-only files - which seems to be an annoying trait that cannot be
overridden.

I have been working for weeks on this and have tried almost every
conceivable option from directory permissions to share permissions,
etc., with no luck.  Windows 2000 Server can do this quite easily, but
with obvious licencing costs.  I would be extremely disappointed if
there wasn't an open-source solution to this.  Is the something obvious
that I'm missing?

Samba has been compiled from source with --with-acl-support option.

All helpful comments would be much welcomed.

Thanks in Advance.

Stuart

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Kernel 2.6 (SuSE 9)
Samba Version: 3.0.10
Windows Client: Windows 2000 Professional