[Samba] GPFS and Windows file attributes

[Jonathan Buzzard]

I was reviewing the GPFS VFS module this afternoon after I had a request 
to add Thumbs.db to the hide files option.

Now I was under the impression that the GPFS VFS module mapped this 
through to the Windows attributes on the under lying file system. That 
is assuming that your GPFS file system is sufficiently recent to support 
Windows attributes.

I did some experimentations with a Terminal Server 2008 and Terminal 
Server 2003 R2 client against a CTDB RHEL Samba 3.5.4 with a VFS_GPFS 
module loaded against GPFS 3.4.0.5 and indeed setting the hidden 
attribute using Windows shows no change when I do mmlsattr -L on the file.

Turning the debug level up to 10 shows lots of errors of the form

get_ea_dos_attributes: Badly formed DOSATTRIB on file .....
ndr_pull_error(2): Bad switch value 39392 for r at 
../librpc/den_ndr/ndr_xattr.c:286

After some poking around it looks to me that 3.5.9 might have a bug fix 
for me. At least I see in the release notes I see BUG 8016: Fix 
gpfs_get_xattr, though I am not entirely sure how this would effect the 
failure to set it.

I also took a look at Samba 3.6.0 and first off noticed that the 
vfs_gpfs manual page seems to have sprouted more information. I tried 
adding in gpfs:winattr = yes to smb.conf and restarting ctdb on all the 
nodes but this made no difference.

I also notice that in 3.6.0 the GPFS module seems to have sprouted a hsm 
feature to report offline status of HSM'ed files back to the windows 
client based on the GPFS_WINATTR_OFFLINE attribute.

I also spied in the 3.6.0 source what looks like a vfs_gpfs_hsm_notify 
module, but there is no manual page for it. Looking at the code it would 
appear to me to send notify returns back to the windows client if the 
file is moved offline, or am I barking up the wrong tree.

The release notes for 3.6 make no mention of these new features of the 
vfs_gpfs module.


JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                 Email: jonathan (at) buzzard.me.uk
Fife, United Kingdom.