samba - Feb 2014 - Wierd Mac issue with matlab samba and unix extensions

After upgrading our Macs to 10.9 some people had trouble with samba shares from
within matlab.  The matlab primitives 'load' and 'save' for
accessing files would return errors like "error using load",
"File may be corrupt", "unable to read", etc.  This also
happened only when matlab was compressing the data file.  We were able to create
a test case in matlab that created-wrote-read a file that would fail within a
few iterations to work on this.

After trying lots of things we found changing "unix extensions" from
no to yes remedied the problem.  This seems peculiar but is very repeatable.

I would appreciate if anyone has any insight on this.  samba server is RHEL
6.5/ext4.  We updated to 10.9.2 and also tried forcing SMB instead of SMB2
mounts on the Mac and this made no difference.

Art Hays
NIH

On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 05:48:54PM +0000, Hays, Arthur (NIH/NEI) [E]
wrote:
> After upgrading our Macs to 10.9 some people had trouble with samba shares
from within matlab.  The matlab primitives 'load' and 'save' for
accessing files would return errors like "error using load",
"File may be corrupt", "unable to read", etc.  This also
happened only when matlab was compressing the data file.  We were able to create
a test case in matlab that created-wrote-read a file that would fail within a
few iterations to work on this.
> 
> After trying lots of things we found changing "unix extensions"
from no to yes remedied the problem.  This seems peculiar but is very
repeatable.
> 
> I would appreciate if anyone has any insight on this.  samba server is RHEL
6.5/ext4.  We updated to 10.9.2 and also tried forcing SMB instead of SMB2
mounts on the Mac and this made no difference.
SMB2 has *NO* unix extensions currently...

Can you log a bug at bugzilla.samba.org
and upload some packet traces captured
with wireshark on port 445 showing the
problem ?

Jeremy.