[Samba] user.DOSATTRIB defaults to hidden?

[Jeremy Allison]

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 07:48:35PM +1100, x20120107 at brindabella.org wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Is there a way to control the default DOS attributes stored in the
> user.DOSATTRIB value?  I'm using a QNAP NAS device (running Samba)
> that seems to create files that have the 'hidden' DOS attribute set
> by the user.DOSATTRIB value as a default.
> 
> The NAS device's smb.conf has the 'store dos attributes' option set
> to yes and each of the 'map hidden', 'map system', 'map archive' and
> 'map readonly' are set to no.  Consequently, the DOS attributes of
> files are controlled by the filesystem extended attribute
> user.DOSATTRIB, and NOT by the executible bits of the files on the
> NAS.  Changing the DOS attributes from a Windows machine does not
> modify any of the permissions (ie. the executable bits) of the files
> on the NAS device.  However, I was able to confirm with the getfattr
> command on the NAS that the user.DOSATTRIB values were changing
> whenever changes to the DOS attributes were made from the Windows
> machine.
> 
> I set this NAS device up recently and rsync'ed my media files to a
> share on it (from a Linux box).  The files themselves had never
> existed on a Windows box.  When browsing the share as guest from a
> Windows box, none of the files were visible (unless 'show hidden
> files' was enabled on the Windows box).  This issue has been
> bothering many users of the QNAP NAS devices as well as users of
> some other brands too.
> 
> When I first copied the files to the NAS, I assume it was Samba that
> would have originally set the user.DOSATTRIB values?  If so, why
> would they be set as 'hidden' by default?
> 
> From a Linux box, I am able to recursively modify the user.DOSATTRIB
> values using smbclient as follows:
> cd /mountpoint
> find * -type f -exec smbclient -N -c 'setmode "{}" -h' //server/sharename \;
> 
> However, it is not clear to me why they would be set to 'hidden' in
> the first place.  If 'store dos attributes' is set to 'yes' in
> smb.conf, does the 'create mask' setting affect the user.DOSATTRIB
> values?

No.

> One other weird thing - if I unset the world readable bit on these
> files (from the NAS box), they are no longer hidden from the point
> of view of the Windows machine (though they are no longer readable).
> It seems like the permissions are still mapping the DOS attributes
> in some way even though the map hidden option is set to no.  What's
> weird though is that it isn't one of the executable bits as
> documented in the Samba documentation that is modifying the hidden
> attribute.
> 
> Grateful for any insights into these issues.

Samba won't set the files as hidden by default. When you
first copy files to the server from the Windows box do
a debug level 10 of one file copy and see if you can see
what might be going wrong.

No version of Samba from samba.org will set the files
as "hidden" by default.

Jeremy