[Samba] badly mangled names from certain old apps

[Jeremy Allison]

On Tue, Nov 01, 2005 at 12:20:48PM -0600, Chris Garrigues wrote:
> I just took on a new client who is having a curious problem with mangled 
> names.  Here's the history as I understand it:
> 
> Originally they were on an NT server and there was no issue.
> 
> My predecessor moved them to a samba server running on gentwo.  I do not know 
> what version of samba or how he moved the data, but when he did so, any files 
> and folders with more than 8 characters started appearing mangled from two and 
> only two apps.  Those two apps are qbtimer (Quickbooks) and "RAM Structural
> System".
> 
> I have moved them to a new server running 3.0.13 under Mandriva.  The file 
> names still appear mangled.
> 
> Examples of how they are mangled:
> 
> Engineering		-> EHTEC6~Q
> MSWord Templates	-> MLLW2U~K
> 
> The apps are running under XP and my user swears they didn't have a problem 
> under the old NT server.  My assumption is that these two apps are using an 
> old broken API, but if it really worked fine to an NT server, then there must 
> be something better we can do...if we just get more standard looking 8.3 
> mangling, that would help.

You can use the old mangling method by specifying :

mangling method = hash

in your smb.conf. The default method is hash2 which gives
better collision properties but less readable names as 
you noticed.

Jeremy.