samba - Dec 2002 - Create time changing by itself?

Are there some known problems related to ctime changing by itself? I
didn't find anything with google at least. tar seems to be complaining
about it all the time:

[cras@hurina] ~% tar cf test.tar /mnt/cygwin/home 
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
tar: /mnt/cygwin/home/Timo Sirainen/xxx/xxxxx.xxx: file changed as we read it

This happens with my Debian/unstable (samba 2.999+3.0.alpha20-4, 2.4.19
kernel) but also with default Redhat 8 installation. With the Redhat
system cp'ing files also complains about this. Both are reading files
shared by Windows 2000 (mount //comp/c$ /mnt -o username=xx).

It seems to happen mostly when taring larger files. 10MB file was enough
with my Debian system. It also needs to read a couple of files before
the larger one.

On 16 Dec 2002, Timo Sirainen wrote:
> Are there some known problems related to ctime changing by itself? I
> didn't find anything with google at least. tar seems to be complaining
> about it all the time:
> 
> [cras@hurina] ~% tar cf test.tar /mnt/cygwin/home 
> tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
> tar: /mnt/cygwin/home/Timo Sirainen/xxx/xxxxx.xxx: file changed as we read
it
Yes, this is known. smbfs does some strange time operations when closing a
file. I think the idea is to make sure the time is changed when a file has
been written to (NT4 doesn't, or not always?).


I had someone that I thought I had tricked into testing this but I haven't
heard anything for a while. The relevant code is (probably) this
file/function in the kernel source tree:

fs/smbfs/proc.c:smb_proc_close_inode()

Try removing the "Kludge alert" parts and if that fails, the 
smb_proc_setattr_ext() call.


Or wait until I get around to it.

/Urban