[Samba] Strange issue with deleting files on shares

[Jeremy Carhanter]

Hi All,

I am migrating one of the servers I have to administer and I came across 
this issue. It is going to be a little bit complicated to describe, but 
I'll do my best.

First the configurations:
OLD SERVER: CentOS release 5.3 (Final), kernel 2.6.18-128.el5, samba 
version 3.0.33-3.7.el5
CURRENT SERVER: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, kernel 3.2.0-29-generic, samba version 
3.6.3
CLIENTS: Mix of Windows XP SP3 and fullly updated Windows 7
If anything else about the configuration will be necessary, just let me 
know.

What we need, is a samba share that is fully writable, but with 
undeletable files. With undeletable directories exactly, files on the 
other hand, must be deletable (because of the way MS Word edits files) . 
So far it works very well, but my suspicion is, that the behavior we 
have now between the server and the clients isn't configurable.

The directory which is the root of the share is owned by root and has 
the sticky bit on. So do all the subdirs and when some client creates 
new dir, this is achieved by a cron script (for a small amount of time, 
the directory is owned by the original creator and without the sticky 
bit set, but that is ok), that changes the owner to root and sets the 
sticky bit on each directory not owned by root. Filesystem rights are 
set to rwxrwxrwx (chmod 1777 is used in the cron script) so everybody 
can write everywhere. When some client (they of course connect as other 
users than root) deletes a directory an error screen appears, the 
directory doesn't get deleted and so does NOTHING inside of that 
directory. By nothing I mean also the files, owned by the user who 
wanted to delete the directory. If I do this from a linux box (connect 
as the same user as from windows, same rights, same server, same files, 
same everything, just connecting from linux) the deleting is applied 
recursively, meaning that samba traverses all subdirs of the directory I 
wanted to delete and in each of these subdirs (and their subdirs and so 
on) deletes files owned by me.

And here is where the problem comes... On the new server, this 
linux-specific behavior applies also to windows clients. If I delete 
some directory, which has the sticky bit set and is owned by root I do 
see an error about permissions but all files owned by me in all of the 
subdirs of this directory get deleted. And that is something that is not 
allowed to happen.

So, my question is, am I missing something and is this somehow 
configurable? Or did the deleting operation in samba source code changed 
so much, that this "bug" we are happily using has been fixed and the 
recursive deleting is how it should correctly be done? And if so, are 
there any suggestions how to achieve the behavior we have now, except 
for staying with the old version of samba?

Thank you all for your help and I apologize for my English.

Cheers,
Jeremy