[Samba] Wine broken on Samba shares due to colon ":" filenames

Bob Smith rwsmith at bislink.net
Sat Jun 20 16:25:44 GMT 2009


Not sure when this problem first cropped up as I went through several
upgrades and changes this year with my Samba servers and Ubuntu
workstation. 

I have a Samba server (Version 3.3.2-0.33.fc11) and I am running Ubuntu
(Karmic Koala latest) on my workstation. Earlier this year I added
pam_mount.so so that I could automount my home directory from the Samba
server when I logged into my workstation. So my home directory is
mounted as:

//san01/rwsmith on /home/users/rwsmith type cifs (rw,mand)

I used to mount it via /etc/fstab using NFS.

I'm not a big fan of Wine so I do not use it very much. However it turns
out that Google has ported Picasa to Linux using Wine. 

The problem is that Picasa and Wine are not working because there is a
problem when the home directory, hence ~/.wine and ~/.google, are
located on a Samba share. When I start Picasa from the command line I
get the following error:

ln: creating symbolic link
`/home/users/rwsmith/.google/picasa/3.0/dosdevices/c:': No such file or
directory
ln: creating symbolic link
`/home/users/rwsmith/.google/picasa/3.0/dosdevices/z:': No such file or
directory

When I do a ls -l on this directory from my workstation I get:

ls: cannot read symbolic link z:: No such file or directory
ls: cannot read symbolic link c:: No such file or directory
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rwsmith rwsmith 10 2009-06-20 12:09 c:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rwsmith rwsmith  1 2009-06-20 12:09 z:


When I do the ls -l on the Samba server I get:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 rwsmith rwsmith 10 2009-06-20 12:09 c: -> ../drive_c
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rwsmith rwsmith  1 2009-06-20 12:09 z: -> /

I know that the colon ":" character is illegal for DOS/Windowx clients
but why it is illegal for Samba/CIFS? Is there any way to work around
this issue? I have set "mangled names = no" for the [homes] share on the
Samba server but this did not help. The only other parameters in Samba
that I think might be involved are:

[Global]
  dos charset =
  unix charset = UTF8


Any suggestions or help? I really don't want to go back to using NFS!



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