samba - Feb 2001 - Help required.

Hi,

We experience some bizarre behaviour yesterday with our system, and I am
wondering if anybody can help with it. We are running a RedHat Linux 6.1 box,
with Samba 2.0.5. The rest of our network is running WinNT. We have one
administrative share "/" which Sysadmins access as the
"root" user via Samba. We yesterday attempted to backup out Linux
installation to DAT, using an NT box accessing the Linux "/" share.

After the backup, we noticed some strange behaviour. FOr example, email was no
longer being delivered, with a "Permission Denied" error appearing in
the log. It became evident that there were a number of system files (especially
executables) that are owned by the "root" user on the Linux box, that
had apparently been given a "chmod u-x" command. Programs such as
Linuxconf no longer operated because there wasn't execute permission for
"root".

My question is basically, could this have something to do with running the
Backup via Samba? Will Samba, by design, chmod u-x any file it finds that is
root-executable, and then perhaps not change it back? If this is not the case,
does anybody have any other suggestions?

The system logs show no record of anybody or any program chmod-ing anything.

Help will be appreciated!

Thanks in advance,
Dan Goodes

Competitive Edge Software
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Hi, Dan.
> My question is basically, could this have something to do with running the
Backup via
> Samba? Will Samba, by design, chmod u-x any file it finds that is
root-executable,
> and then perhaps not change it back? If this is not the case, does anybody
have any
> other suggestions?
I suspect that your backup software clears the DOS/Windows archive bit,
which Samba maps to the owner's executable permission.  See Section 5.3 of
the O'Reilly book Using Samba for details.

I believe you can disable this behavior by entering "map archive = No"
for
the share in smb.conf, but this may cause problems for the backup software.

I hope this helps.

-Bill