[Samba] Re: Wintertime/summertime difference - Samba servers show wrong time ?

[Dragan Krnic]

Surprisingly few threads on this fascinating subject!
(They're all in the Cc:) Only one solution proposed by Thomas 
Honigman and Thomas Guenther. In a posting of Feb 8, this year, 
they proposed conditioning the use of "kludge GMT", which is 
what Samba marshals on the wire as GMT but which is wrong under 
most circumstances involving daylight savings time switch, 
upon the value of the boolean smb.conf option "use kludge gmt", 
even using "TRUE" as default in order not to break the 
compatibility.

Can anyone tell why this 9-months old proposal was not accepted ?

I've implemented their patches (but made FALSE the default,
of course) and it solved my problems big way.

The way it works now in the sources, Samba goes out of its way 
to force Windows clients to see the file times the way Unix and 
other more mature systems see them. If a file was modified at 
noon 12:00:00 of any day, it shows 12:00:00 always, regardless 
of the date on which it was modified or the date on which one 
is beholding it. Samba does it by subtracting from the real GMT 
in the timestamps the difference between "TimeDiff(timestamp)" 
and "get_serverzone()", which means that it fakes the timestamp 
GMT in such a way that Windows still see the right time and not 
the wrong Windows time, which is actually what everybody wants 
to see, so that pacemakers don't stop and rod injectors don't melt.

Small details like this are show stoppers.

> ... the immediate cause was how file timestamps were
> interpreted/presented by samba server as opposed to the expectations
> of a Windows client.
> 
> According to this M$ Article:
> 
>       http://support.microsoft.com/kb/129574/en-us
> 
>      "When Windows NT automatically adjusts for daylight savings time,
>       the times on files on Windows NT file system (NTFS) partitions
>       and the events in the event logs are retroactively shifted by
>       one hour, even though the files and event records were created
>       before the daylight savings time change."
> 
> In other words, Linux-based Samba servers keep on showing the right
> time of the day when a file was created/changed/modified/accessed
> whereas Windows falsifies it by an hour retroactively. But being
> right is not enough.