[vox-tech] Filename suffix dependent deletion problem with Samba

[Peter Salzman]

Summary:

It appears that Samba refuses to delete files with certain types of
extensions, but I can't find any mention of suffix-dependent
permissions in Samba, so something else must be happening that *looks
like* suffix dependent permissions.



Setup:

My "M drive" on a Windows machine is a Samba share, /data/mp3, mounted
from my Linux workstation.  So:

                 Satan         Samba     Lucifer
                 /data/mp3    -------->    M:

I have a Windows explorer window opened to M:\test and a putty
terminal opened to /data/mp3/test (they're viewing the same
directory).



The Test:

On the Linux command line, I do:

     $ touch foo.txt foo.mp3
     $ lla
     total 8.0K
     drwxr-xr-x  2 p p          4.0K  2011-03-19 13:32 ./
     drwxrwx--- 42  p users  4.0K  2011-03-19 13:25 ../
     -rw-r--r--    1 p p            0      2011-03-19 13:32 foo.mp3
     -rw-r--r--    1 p p            0      2011-03-19 13:32 foo.txt

So the files are *exactly* the same except for their suffixes.   Now,
turning to the Windows explorer window, I can delete foo.txt, but I
cannot delete foo.mp3!

Even weirder: From the Windows explorer, I can rename the base
filenames (foo), but I can only rename the suffix (i.e. change the
filetype) of the txt file, not the mp3 file.  How strange is that?

Even stranger, if there are two mp3 files, say, foo.mp3 and bar.mp3,
from the Windows explorer, I can't delete foo.mp3 by itself, and I
can't delete bar.mp3 by itself, but if I control-select both files, I
can delete them together.   In other words, I can't delete single mp3
files, but I can delete multiple mp3 files.

So the mp3 filename suffix is handled very strangely.  After a little
testing, I found that *wav files also suffer from the strange Samba
deletion / filetype change restrictions.   txt, pdf, avi, mpg, xls,
doc, ogg mp2 all behave normally.

I tried bumping up the Samba log level to 3, but that really gave me
no clues at all.

Does anyone have any guesses what might be happening?

Thanks!
Pete