[Samba] Anecdote: File folder "conflict"

Mike 1100100 at gmail.com
Wed Jun 24 15:36:31 MDT 2015


CentOS 7.1503
SerNet Samba ver. 4.1.17

Had a raid controller card fail on my AD DC which also contained my file
shares.
I rebuilt and had to restore all the file share data from archives.
Users have a way of intentionally/accidentally moving/copying/renaming
sub-folders often.  So my rsync'd archives end up with some duplicate
directories, etc.

I ended up with a few directories that looked like:

/share/folder/HELLO
/share/folder/Hello
/share/folder/hello

All other shares and subfolders worked seamlessly and the users weren't
aware of any change to their data.  But the folders that had the same name
but different Uppercase/Lowercase arrangement had problems from the start.

Content of those directories would randomly appear/disappear with
irregularity.
A user would create or modify a file "something.txt" and save it in
/share/folder/HELLO but it would only be seen in /share/folder/Hello; or
maybe not seen anywhere in either directory.  I could ssh into the samba
server and see the file in /share/folder/hello but nowhere else.

While logged in as root on the samba server, I could create file
something2.txt in /share/folder/hello and then see it in all three
directories or sometimes only 2 of the 3 directories.

At first, I thought it had something to do with the windows clients
possibly caching some folder contents and it conflicted with the new share
content; but that didn't explain all these oddities on the samba server
itself.

Finally --- the only thing that stopped the problem was determining which
folder had the most complete and up to date versions of all the user data,
and rename the other two directories like:

/share/folder/ZZZ555HELLO
/share/folder/ZZZ333Hello

leaving /share/folder/hello   as is.

Here's relevant parts of smb.conf:

# Global parameters
[global]
        workgroup = INTERNAL
        realm = INTERNAL.SAMBA.INFO
        netbios name = PRIMARY
        interfaces = lo,eno1
        bind interfaces only = Yes
        server role = active directory domain controller
        dns forwarder = 75.75.75.75
        idmap_ldb:use rfc2307 = yes

[netlogon]
        path = /var/lib/samba/sysvol/internal.samba.info/scripts
        read only = No

[sysvol]
        path = /var/lib/samba/sysvol
        read only = No

############# Share Definitions ############################

[stuff]
        path = /mnt/share/folder
        read only = no
        create mask = 0777


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