[Samba] stale timestamp hell

[Jeremy Allison]

On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 01:26:43PM -0700, Chuck T. wrote:
> 
> I've been using a Windoze based programming editor (Slickedit) across
> samba shares for years without any problems (most recently with FC5).  I've
> just started using Ubuntu and I'm now having a problem with timestamps
> lagging file writes.  The net result is my editor almost always
> thinks another program has modified the file.
> 
> Today I built and installed samba 3.3.3. from sources and it shows
> the same problem.
> 
> The problem is easy to demonstrate with a batch file:
> 
> ---
> Z:\home\skip>type test.bat
> dir e
> touch e
> dir e
> 
> Z:\home\skip>test
> 
> Z:\home\skip>dir e
>  Volume in drive Z is root
>  Volume Serial Number is 0BF5-02B0
> 
>  Directory of Z:\home\skip
> 
> 03/25/2009  05:00 PM             2,878 e
>                1 File(s)          2,878 bytes
>                0 Dir(s)  60,616,773,632 bytes free
> 
> Z:\home\skip>touch e
> 
> Z:\home\skip>dir e
>  Volume in drive Z is root
>  Volume Serial Number is 0BF5-02B0
> 
>  Directory of Z:\home\skip
> 
> 03/25/2009  05:00 PM             2,878 e
>                1 File(s)          2,878 bytes
>                0 Dir(s)  60,616,773,632 bytes free
> 
> Z:\home\skip>dir e
>  Volume in drive Z is root
>  Volume Serial Number is 0BF5-02B0
> 
>  Directory of Z:\home\skip
> 
> 04/11/2009  01:11 PM             2,878 e
>                1 File(s)          2,878 bytes
>                0 Dir(s)  60,616,773,632 bytes free
> ---
> 
> As you can see running touch and then an immediate directory
> listing shows the old timestamp for the file.  When I do a
> directory manually a second later the timestamp has been
> updated.

The delayed timestamp on write is correct, it's "what Windows
does" (tm). Took us a long time to emulate that correctly :-).

To nail this we'd need a comparitive sniff against the same
save being done on a Windows server, with a note as to when
the "file was changed" dialog would have appeared against Samba.

Jeremy.