samba - Jan 2005 - problems with auto mounted share from Macintosh server on SuSE Linux

I recently switched from using Redhat Linux 9 to SuSE 9.2 Pro and am 
having problems with an auto mounted share served from a Macintosh 
running Mac OS 10.3.6. I can read from the share without problems. 
However, writing to it is a different story.

All the files/folders on the share are owned by janee in the group 
janee and have rw owner and group permissions. I've tried playing with 
the automount settings without much success. The SuSE smbfstab file 
currently contains:

//softweave-1/shared /smb smbfs 
credentials=/root/.smbpw,uid=awpe,gid=janee,fmask=664,dmask=775

I created a janee group on the Linux system with the same group id as 
it has on the Mac. The awpe user exists only on the Linux system. After 
rereading the smb.conf docs a few times, I'm still unclear which system 
the uid and gid values apply to. When I was using Redhat, they were set 
to the guest account's user id and group, but that didn't seem to work 
with SuSE.

The Macintosh's smb.conf contains these globals:

[global]
guest account = janee
encrypt passwords = yes
auth methods = guest opendirectory
passdb backend = opendirectorysam guest
printer admin = @admin, @staff
server string = Mac OS X shared files
unix charset = UTF-8-MAC
display charset = UTF-8-MAC
dos charset = CP437
use spnego = no
client ntlmv2 auth = no
netbios name = softweave-1
security = USER
hide dot files = yes
debug timestamp = yes
max log size = 50
workgroup = WORKGROUP
map to guest = Bad User
local master = yes

After changing the share's smb.conf entry to:
[shared]
path = /Volumes/SHARED/shared
read only = No
inherit permissions = no
create mask = 0664
directory mask = 0774

I am able to create directories that I can modify from Linux. I can 
also copy files to the share. However, I cannot save files to the share 
from applications such as emacs. All modifications to the share from 
SuSE are very slow - for example creating a new directory takes about 
20 seconds.

I had no such problems when I was connecting to the share from Redhat 
9. I have no problems writing to the share from Windows XP. All these 
computers are on a personal network and it's important that files be 
easily shared among the machines.

I am considering switching to a different Linux if I cannot fix these 
problems I'm having under SuSE. Help in fixing them would be much 
appreciated.

Jane Eisenstein

My inability to write files to the Samba share seems to have been fixed 
by upgrading to Mac OS X 10.3.7.

I'd still like to know whether the smbmount uid and gid options refer 
to a user and group on the server or the client system.

Cheers,
Jane Eisenstein