samba - Jul 2024 - Weird folders / files after upgrading to Samba 4.20

Hallo,

yes this is an "ls -lAh" on the samba fileserver side in the 
corresponding directory.

Downgrading to 4.19 does not remove the weird directories and files. But 
it prevents new weird ones being created...

Looking at the timestamps these seem to be created when (heavy?) 
filesystem operations are being done. There is a cronjob that imports 
images at 1oo and it runs for around 30 mins. Most of the weird 
directory are created between 1:00 and 1:30. This cronjob runs on 
another server which has this share mounted via fstab.

Nobody else has these problems with Samba 4.20 and debian 12? Any help 
is greatly appreciated.

Regards, Matthias K?hne.

Am 18.07.24 um 11:52 schrieb Michael Tokarev via samba:
> 17.07.2024 10:54, Matthias K?hne | Ellerhold Aktiengesellschaft via 
> samba wrote:
>> Hello lovely samba-people,
>
> Hi! :)
>
>> after upgrading to 4.20 some file shares randomly get weird directories
>> and files in them:
>>
>> drwxrwx---+??? 3 AD-ELLERHOLD\user AD-ELLERHOLD\group 4.0K May 29 
>> 01:14 ''$'\352'
>> drwxrwx---+??? 3 AD-ELLERHOLD\user AD-ELLERHOLD\group 4.0K May 29 
>> 01:14 ''$'\324'
>> drwxrwx---+??? 3 AD-ELLERHOLD\user AD-ELLERHOLD\group 4.0K May 18 
>> 01:12 ''$'\001\002'
>
> This looks like a listing from linux side, - is this a local linux 
> filesystem view?
>
>> As you can see samba creates folders with random (binary?!) names. 
>> Sometime parts of correct paths are used (see dir "_images"
instead
>> of the correct dir "my_images").
>>
>> Downgrading the fileserver back to 4.19 fixes this issue.
>
> What do you mean "fixes" ?? Are the "wrong" files
disappear when
> downgrading?
>
> Do you know when these files gets created?
>
>> As far as Im aware, these directories can be safely deleted because 
>> there may be files in them, nothing is lost. In this instance every 
>> expected file is in "images", "my-data" and
"domain.de". The files in
>> the extra dirs are nonsense.
>>
>> At first we thought its a problem with Windows clients, because 
>> shares that were access regularly by windows machines had the most 
>> problems, but the share above is ONLY used by another debian machine 
>> - mounted via cifs-utils! So only samba + cifs-utils may be the 
>> culprit here.
>>
>> We use Debian 12 Bookworm with samba 2:4.20.2+dfsg-5~mjt-deb12 on the 
>> server and client side. For cifs-utils the version 2:7.0-2 is used 
>> (client side).
>>
>> Does anybody have any clue whats happening here?
>
> Not yet, I for one has never seen anything like this before.
>
> Thanks,
>
> /mjt
>
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18.07.2024 13:03, Matthias K?hne | Ellerhold Aktiengesellschaft via samba
wrote:
> Hallo,
> 
> yes this is an "ls -lAh" on the samba fileserver side in the
> corresponding directory.
> 
> Downgrading to 4.19 does not remove the weird directories and files. But
> it prevents new weird ones being created...
> 
> Looking at the timestamps these seem to be created when (heavy?)
> filesystem operations are being done. There is a cronjob that imports
> images at 1oo and it runs for around 30 mins. Most of the weird
> directory are created between 1:00 and 1:30. This cronjob runs on
> another server which has this share mounted via fstab.
Aha.  This is much more understandable.

Do you have unix extensions enabled on the samba server?
4.20 has some work in this area.  It might be interesting to
test 4.20 without unix extensions - if you can afford the
same havoc as you already had (which isn't easy for sure).

Provided this problem is reproducible, ofc.

Maybe you can run your job on another - test - share with 4.20
and switch back to 4.19 before real night job is run.

This is just a wild guess, anyway.
> Nobody else has these problems with Samba 4.20 and debian 12? Any help
> is greatly appreciated.
cifs mount isn't seen/used often already.  From your description it
looks like linux cifs client with samba 4.20 is the bad combination,
and it might require some high filesystem load.

Thanks,

/mjt