samba - Sep 2010 - question about CIFS client glitches

Hello,

Trying out a CIFS mount of a W2K8 x64 file system from CentOS 
5.5 and running into problems, and trying to figure out how to 
proceed.

I mount up the Windows share, then run a script that expands 
about ten TAR format archives containing a couple of hundred 
files with the 'pax' utility.  Then it removes about two dozen 
files.  The script is a primitive source-code version extractor.

Unfortunately the resulting tree is quite incorrect.  Some of the 
files that should be deleted by the 'rm' commands are not, and 
some of the files that should be there from the expansion are 
missing.  The script works fine with EXT2/3/4 and NFSv3 mounts.

So it seems to me CIFS mounts are not ready for use in 
production or development.

Before I give up, is there anything obvious that I'm missing?
I searched for relevant bugs in Red Hat, Samba and Kernel.org 
bugzillas and didn't find anything that seems to match.

The version mix in use is a little odd.  The kernel and 
'cifs.ko' modules are pure RHEL/CentOS version 2.6.18-194.11.3.el5,
but instead of using the distro version of Samba the
system is running vanilla Samba 3.5.2.

If anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please let me know.

Thanks

At 05:39 PM 9/16/2010 -0400, starlight at binnacle.cx
wrote:
>Trying out a CIFS mount of a W2K8 x64 file system from CentOS 
>5.5 and running into problems, and trying to figure out how to 
>proceed.
Oops.  I see the problem is that CIFS, at least in the older 
stable versions, does not support hard links.  The extracted 
archives have a few of these and so the resulting tree is not a 
synchronized copy of the original.

Oh well, so much for that.

On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 4:39 PM,  <starlight at binnacle.cx>
wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Trying out a CIFS mount of a W2K8 x64 file system from CentOS
> 5.5 and running into problems, and trying to figure out how to
> proceed.
>
> I mount up the Windows share, then run a script that expands
> about ten TAR format archives containing a couple of hundred
> files with the 'pax' utility. ?Then it removes about two dozen
> files. ?The script is a primitive source-code version extractor.
>
> Unfortunately the resulting tree is quite incorrect. ?Some of the
> files that should be deleted by the 'rm' commands are not, and
> some of the files that should be there from the expansion are
> missing. ?The script works fine with EXT2/3/4 and NFSv3 mounts.
>
> So it seems to me CIFS mounts are not ready for use in
> production or development.
>
> Before I give up, is there anything obvious that I'm missing?
> I searched for relevant bugs in Red Hat, Samba and Kernel.org
> bugzillas and didn't find anything that seems to match.
>
> The version mix in use is a little odd. ?The kernel and
> 'cifs.ko' modules are pure RHEL/CentOS version 2.6.18-194.11.3.el5,
This is quite old kernel, but perhaps it was updated to include more
recent fixes - can you view the version information on the file, ie
the cifs.ko module (you can do this by running modinfo on cifs.ko)


-- 
Thanks,

Steve

On Thu, 16 Sep 2010 18:49:49 -0400
starlight at binnacle.cx wrote:
> At 05:39 PM 9/16/2010 -0400, starlight at binnacle.cx wrote:
> >Trying out a CIFS mount of a W2K8 x64 file system from CentOS 
> >5.5 and running into problems, and trying to figure out how to 
> >proceed.
> 
> Oops.  I see the problem is that CIFS, at least in the older 
> stable versions, does not support hard links.  The extracted 
> archives have a few of these and so the resulting tree is not a 
> synchronized copy of the original.
> 
> Oh well, so much for that.
> 
Ok, good to know. There were patches that went to mainline to make CIFS
support server inode numbers correctly, which is sort of a requirement
for proper hardlink support. Those were really too invasive for a minor
RHEL release however.

-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton at redhat.com>

At 05:50 PM 9/16/2010 -0500, Steve French wrote:
>On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 4:39 PM,  <starlight at binnacle.cx> wrote:
>> Trying out a CIFS mount of a W2K8 x64 file system from CentOS
>> 5.5 and running into problems, and trying to figure out how to
>> proceed.
...
>
>This is quite old kernel, but perhaps it was updated to include more
>recent fixes - can you view the version information on the file, ie
>the cifs.ko module (you can do this by running modinfo on 
>cifs.ko)
>
Thank you for the follow-up.  Per my last message this was my 
being a clueless in regards to the lack of hard/soft link 
support in the old version.  'modinfo' pegs it as 1.60RH.

Hopefully RHEL6 will include CIFS file links as it might work 
better to compile on Linux from a Windows share rather than 
vice-versa.  'makedepend' runs painfully slow from Windows over
a Samba share unless IPoIB is used for transport.

Perhaps I'll try it under Fedora, though in general I find 
wrestling with the constant change of the moving-target distro 
too much.

It is quite encouraging to see CIFS work in general.  Last time 
I tried three or four years ago the system crashed shortly after 
issuing the mount command.