samba - Jan 2004 - Missing Directory Entries (SMBFS)

SuSE 9.0 Pro - Kernel 2.4.21 - Samba 2.2.8a and 3.0.1-14

Here's my problem:

On a box runninng XP, I have a shared folder which contains 130+
subdirectories. This share is mounted on my linux box from
'/etc/smbfstab',
but some directories do not show up in directory listings. It's never more
than one, and which one varies, but generally seems to be in or near the
last half of the listing. As a test, I can do 'ls -l | wc -l' and the
number
will frequently be 1 less than it should be. The same test on a directory
with over 700 files in it I gave as many as 9 missing entries.

When I first noticed the problem I was running Redhat 9. Now I'm running
SuSE 9 and the problem persists. I've also tried Samba 3.0.1, but that
didn't seem to make any difference.

I'm guessing this is an issue with smbfs mounts, because I can do
'smbclient //some-server/blah -U user%pass -c dir' and I don't get
any
missing directories or files.

Here appear to be similar reports, but no solutions:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=samba&m=102458988807544&w=2
http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9603.1/0579.html
http://marc.free.net.ph/message/20030811.020338.5e7083b5.html
http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2002-November/025587.html

Some of the above reports are pretty old which makes me wonder why more
people haven't run into the problem or if there's some kind of weird
system
combinations which cause it.

What I know:

Directories with fewer items don't have this problem.
The larger the directory, the more missing entries.

Update:

I actually wrote this a few days ago and never sent it because through my
twiddling the problem mysteriously vanished (or so I thought). Now I find
that it's still happening, but much more rarely than before. I stopped some
Norton Antivirus related services on the Windows machine and then (after
that didn't help) I restarted them and I also did a Norton update. Maybe
it's related to NAV activity on the XP box, but I can't say for certain.
Now
that it happens so infrequently it's difficult to even test.

So I'm just wondering if anyone else has seen this kind of thing and looking
for advice.

Following up on this (please feel free to tell me if there is a more
appropriate place to post this info)...

My smbfs directory entries began to "show up missing" more frequently
today,
so I ran ethereal on the Windows box and captured 2 directory listings. One
capture was of an ls of the directory which was complete and the other has a
missing entry.

What I found around the problem area was, a FIND_NEXT2 request from my Linux
box which resulted in 1 FIND_NEXT2 response and 2 NBSS continuation messages
containing the entry list up to the missing entry, then another FIND_NEXT2
requests whose response began after the missing entry. In other words, the
Windows machine never sent the directory entry for the missing item (it just
skipped over it), which implies a problem with the Windows (server) side.
>From what I can tell, the missing entry is always the entry which should
have been first in a FIND_NEXT2 response, so it's a problem of the
FIND_NEXT2 response sometimes being off by one file further into the search
than it should be.

Noting that I never get this problem with 'smbclient //server/share -U
user%pass -c dir' I captured one of those and I can see that the smbclient
dir command does things quite a bit differently. Since I know very little
about how the protocol works, I won't go into all the differences (which may
be irrelevant).
> -----Original Message-----
> SuSE 9.0 Pro - Kernel 2.4.21 - Samba 2.2.8a and 3.0.1-14
> 
> Here's my problem:
> 
> On a box runninng XP, I have a shared folder which contains 130+
> subdirectories. This share is mounted on my linux box from
> '/etc/smbfstab',
> but some directories do not show up in directory listings. It's never
more
> than one, and which one varies, but generally seems to be in or near the
> last half of the listing. As a test, I can do 'ls -l | wc -l' and
the
> number
> will frequently be 1 less than it should be. The same test on a directory
> with over 700 files in it I gave as many as 9 missing entries.
[snip]
> I'm guessing this is an issue with smbfs mounts, because I can do
> 'smbclient //some-server/blah -U user%pass -c dir' and I don't
get any
> missing directories or files.
[snip]
> What I know:
> 
> Directories with fewer items don't have this problem.
> The larger the directory, the more missing entries.