[Samba] Wierd Mac issue with matlab samba and unix extensions

[Hays, Arthur (NIH/NEI) [E]]

After upgrading our Macs to 10.9 some people had trouble with samba shares from within matlab.  The matlab primitives 'load' and 'save' for accessing files would return errors like "error using load", "File may be corrupt", "unable to read", etc.  This also happened only when matlab was compressing the data file.  We were able to create a test case in matlab that created-wrote-read a file that would fail within a few iterations to work on this.

After trying lots of things we found changing "unix extensions" from no to yes remedied the problem.  This seems peculiar but is very repeatable.

I would appreciate if anyone has any insight on this.  samba server is RHEL 6.5/ext4.  We updated to 10.9.2 and also tried forcing SMB instead of SMB2 mounts on the Mac and this made no difference.

Art Hays
NIH