[Samba] Samba and macOS questions

[Sitsofe Wheeler]

After upgrading to macOS 10.15 I've hit an issue where if the share's connection is interrupted for long enough (e.g. because the server is rebooted) then the client Mac's Finder becomes stuck and puts up a message 'The operation can’t be completed because the original item for “<share>” can’t be found. Sometimes restarting Finder helps, sometimes restarting sharingd helps but sometimes nothing helps. Older versions of macOS (e.g. 10.14) didn't have this issue. At any rate I don't think there's anything Samba can do about that issue...

However, I have noticed that when macOS is connected to another macOS served SMB share it receives a notification that the share is going down that it displays to the user. Is this done via the SMB connection or is it some out of band thing?

Over on https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Configure_Samba_to_Work_Better_with_Mac_OS_X there are a list of suggested options. Is having catia in "vfs objects" definitely needed for good macOS compatibility or does it just depend on whether you are running a Mac program that creates an awkward filename? That page also recommends having streams_xattr in "vfs objects" but the vfs_fruit man page warns "Warning: this option should not be used with the streams_xattr module due to the extended attributes size limitations of most filesytems.". In 99% of cases is the low limit on Linux filesystem like ext4 (i.e. not  Btrfs, XFS, ZFS) not an issue?

Over on https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_fruit.8.html there's fruit:metadata = stream. Is this strictly better than having it set to = netatalk? I've got a share that used to be used with netatalk but it no longer is and I gather the xattrs can't be converted...


Finally out of curiosity, is Samba's extended macOS compatibility achieved with help from Apple and its source code or is it mostly reverse engineered?