Very bizarre samba NTFS mount read behavior?

[jkcunningham]

I just ran into some very bizarre behavior trying to read an smbfs mounted NTFS directory. A whole group of files were "invisible" to ls, but were actually there.

There are about 300-400 files in this directory on a public network drive (NTFS) - all text files of a few hundred Kb each. On a windows machine I can see them all, open them, etc. There are no special attributes set on these files. I created them from my Gentoo box and moved them to this location using the smbfs mount. I've had this directory mounted for months and never had any problem.

Today I went looking for a set of files and they weren't there - as far as the Gentoo smbfs mount is concerned. But they are still there on the windows side.

To try to debug this, I created a new directory on the network drive and copied the contents of the weird one into it - Icould see all the files at that point from the Gentoo box. But when I deleted the old directory and renamed the new one back to the old one, suddenly the same set of files were invisible again. I even checked with ls -a, but its just like they don't exist.

I have no control over the directory name - it has to be named what it is, or I'd just work out of a different one.

This is totally bizarre. Does anyone have any idea what's going on?

[edit] Additional information: a RedHat 9.0 system nearby can smbmount the same directory and see all the files. This is starting to look like a Gentoo problem. But with what? samba?

-Jeff

[carbon]

isn't NTFS write is still experimental?
_________________
I do what I want, and that's what I do.
GNU World Domination

Carbon

[jkcunningham]

Not for smbmount. Your thinking of directly mounting an NTFS formatted drive, I think (at least, that's always the way I understood it).

Anyway, its a read problem I'm having, not a write problem.

I have an additional piece of data since my post: the Redhat system does duplicate the problem afterall. It can't see the same files I couldn't see. But get this: if I create a junk file - from windows - and drop it into this directory, suddenly all the files become visible to Linux.

The Redhat guy who discovered this is in IT - he's totally baffled. He thinks there is some subtle difference in the way NTFS links nodes that haven't been properly implimented in smbmount (samba) - or Microsoft changed something again (its a closed architecture, recall).

I posted this problem on the linux.samba newsgroup, but so far no one has responded.

Its a really serious problem. If it continues, I will end up being forced to work through windows machines at work whether I like it or not. And it will be very difficult to make a case for continued migration into linux.

Of course, the logical solution is to convert the servers to linux, but that's way too radical for Microsoft-trained IT to even contemplate.

-Jeff

[carbon]

you need someone better than a lil tux helper
_________________
I do what I want, and that's what I do.
GNU World Domination

Carbon