Re: [9fans] cifs fails on nodes named aux

[Ingo Krabbe <ikrabbe.ask@gmail.com>]

>
> not sure why FAT32 would be relevant here, since he's using a linux
> cifs server from an ext fs.  samba mangles reserved names much as it
> mangles long filenames -- check mangle_hash2.c for examples.  when
> samba is deciding if a filename needs to be mangled, it checks for
> reserved words along with filename length and prohibited characters.
> so if samba decides it nees to serve a file named aux, it's going to
> ruin it, unless you specifically disable this behavior.  for the
> record, windows itself does this nonsense as well, unless you've got
> the 'cifs extensions for unix' garbage slathered on.  the curse of bad
> design lives on.
>
> I'm not sufficiently intimate with the cifs server he's using, or plan
> 9's cifs client, to explain why the behavior is different using the
> linux client.  There's generally a lot of magic involved with cifs
> deciding how best to vomit its guts across the wire, and I've
> deliberately avoided learning it where possible.  Were this my system,
> I'd just switch to 9p.
>
> khm

I would like to switch to a 9p distribution of files, but how Do I tell this
other people who want to access files on the servers too: "Here I have a better filesystem you never heard of and likely will never hear, as it is used only by the coolest freaks, whom you are no one of."?

As long as you don't have a solution like: "Take this package, install it to your windows and ignore all license security checks. Anything from then on will be done automatically on your system and all systems you are going to install in the future. So you don't need to care, just access these files." (Which is kind of what people think, Windows Filesharing is).

But taking into account that windows is still the "refence system", files that are named aux, con, nul and prn aren't supported by windows and its very easy to show that this is so. So files don't need to exist or shown correctly, that are named this way, as long as I know about that fact and can easily demonstrate that windows truly fails to work and still contains design faults that are a quarter of a century old.

BTW.: The cifs server I use is the debian squeeze samba package (Version ~3.5.6). I'm not sure about all these versions and names, some call it cifs, some call it samba, I still like raider, though it's called twix now. (raider was the name for this twix chocolate, caramel bar, in germany in the 80's ;).

Maybe I will debug this further when I find some time...

Cheers,

Ingo Krabbe