samba - May 2011 - XP Clients Showing Incorrect Filenames

I'm seeing something fairly odd where XP clients show some - but not
nearly all -filenames as a random jumble of characters. The files are
still perfectly accessible; if I tell windows manually what the file
type is, they'll open.

I don't think it's a character set issue. Affected filenames contain
alphanumeric characters (a-zA-z, no accents or anything outside
ASCII), periods, and hyphens. It doesn't seem like any sort of
client-side caching. I tried a couple different client machines that
have never accessed the share before and they see the same incorrect
names. This seems to happen only in directories with a large number of
files (500+), but that could be coincidental. The problem always
affects a handful of files in the directory rather than all files.

The odd file names all look like "AH6I10~Z". Besides the tilde always
being 2nd to last, the other characters don't have any consistent
mapping to the actual file name.

Samba 3.0.33, CentOS binaries

On Fri, May 27, 2011 at 11:01:36AM -0500, Andy Theuninck
wrote:
> I'm seeing something fairly odd where XP clients show some - but not
> nearly all -filenames as a random jumble of characters. The files are
> still perfectly accessible; if I tell windows manually what the file
> type is, they'll open.
> 
> I don't think it's a character set issue. Affected filenames
contain
> alphanumeric characters (a-zA-z, no accents or anything outside
> ASCII), periods, and hyphens. It doesn't seem like any sort of
> client-side caching. I tried a couple different client machines that
> have never accessed the share before and they see the same incorrect
> names. This seems to happen only in directories with a large number of
> files (500+), but that could be coincidental. The problem always
> affects a handful of files in the directory rather than all files.
> 
> The odd file names all look like "AH6I10~Z". Besides the tilde
always
> being 2nd to last, the other characters don't have any consistent
> mapping to the actual file name.
Oh how soon we forget :-). Google for DOS 8.3 filename limitation :-).

Remember there are some filenames (containing a : character etc.) that
Windows can't use.

Jeremy.