samba - May 2010 - DOS Attributes with mixed xattr filesystem support

Hi,

I'm running Samba as a glorified NAS at the moment - to begin with, I 
have an ext3 storage partition, /storage. In this is a directory, 
/storage/Personal, which has its own Samba share (also Personal). At 
this point, dos attributes using filesystem xattrs work beautifully. The 
problem comes when I start to fiddle further...
I have a Novell NetWare filesystem  (ncpmount) mounted at 
/home/jarrad/novellmount - accessed from the system running the samba 
server, this works fine; however, the ncpmount filesystem does not 
support extended attributes. /home/jarrad/novellmount has a subdirectory 
/home/jarrad/novellmount/directory1.
Now the fun: as soon as I make a symbolic link 
/storage/Personal/novelldirectory1 to point to 
/home/jarrad/novellmount/directory1, Samba stops emulating DOS 
attributes on my Personal share (at least as far as my Windows 7 client 
is concerned).
Is there any way around this?

Thanks,
Jarrad Whitaker

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 12:53:12AM +1000, Jarrad Whitaker
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm running Samba as a glorified NAS at the moment - to begin with, I  
> have an ext3 storage partition, /storage. In this is a directory,  
> /storage/Personal, which has its own Samba share (also Personal). At  
> this point, dos attributes using filesystem xattrs work beautifully. The  
> problem comes when I start to fiddle further...
> I have a Novell NetWare filesystem  (ncpmount) mounted at  
> /home/jarrad/novellmount - accessed from the system running the samba  
> server, this works fine; however, the ncpmount filesystem does not  
> support extended attributes. /home/jarrad/novellmount has a subdirectory  
> /home/jarrad/novellmount/directory1.
> Now the fun: as soon as I make a symbolic link  
> /storage/Personal/novelldirectory1 to point to  
> /home/jarrad/novellmount/directory1, Samba stops emulating DOS  
> attributes on my Personal share (at least as far as my Windows 7 client  
> is concerned).
> Is there any way around this?
You can make the NetWare filesystem a separate share, and then
add the line:

vfs objects = xattr_tdb

to allow EA's to be emulated and stored in a tdb. This isn't a
common configuration so please let us know how it goes (i.e.
there may be bugs :-).

Jeremy.