[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.
> 
> It's funny you should comment on this - I was in the middle
> of moving to the Samba4 way of handling times and timezones
> (back porting the Samba4 code to Samba3) to fix the timezone
> problems people have. I was planning to get this into 3.0.21.
> 
> Would this fix the problem ? I'm expecting so, but would
> appreciate more feedback.
> 
> I'll look back for the patch to remove the kludge GMT, but
> I'd rather just remove it entirely and clean up the code.

Good to hear that you think the same way, Jeremy.

A clean break is what I would suggest too, but since it would
take a long time to propagate, perhaps something more eye
catching, like the mentioned weird new option in smb.conf, 
even if the default should be FALSE, would be appropriate to 
draw attention to the fact that we're M$-compliant on that count.

"Use kludge GMT" is perhaps not revealing enough, if not
downright misleading. 

How about "Ape Microsoft's Daylight Savings Time bug = TRUE"
for default and mentioning the value explicitly in checkparms?