Picasa/Wine on Samba share not working

[Bob Smith]

I can not run Picasa (and for that matter Wine) when my home folder is
mounted using smbfs/cifs and the backend server is Samba v3.3. The
problem appears to be related to the symbolic links in the ~/.google/
picasa/3.0/dosdevices folder where the file names include the colon
":", eg. c:, d:, d::, etc. This wasn't problem in past when my home
folder was NFS mounted.

The server is Fedora 11 running Samba 3.3 and my workstation is
running Ubuntu Karmic Koala (latest).

When I run picasa from the command line I get the following errors:

ln: creating symbolic link `/home/users/rwsmith/.google/picasa/3.0/
dosdevices/c:': No such file or directory
ln: creating symbolic link `/home/users/rwsmith/.google/picasa/3.0/
dosdevices/z:': No such file or directory

When I do a ls -l on ~/.google/picasa/3.0/dosdevices/ from my
workstation I get:

ls: cannot read symbolic link z:: No such file or directory
ls: cannot read symbolic link c:: No such file or directory
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rwsmith rwsmith 10 2009-06-20 12:09 c:
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rwsmith rwsmith 1 2009-06-20 12:09 z:

When I do a ls -l on ~/.google/picasa/3.0/dosdevices from the Samba
server I get:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 rwsmith rwsmith 10 2009-06-20 12:09 c: -> ../drive_c
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rwsmith rwsmith 1 2009-06-20 12:09 z: -> /

I know that the colon ":" is one of seven special characters in
Windows and Samba. The client cifs implementation (version 1.12) is
supposed to implement the option "nomapchars" which should not map any
of the seven special characters but it does not seem to be working on
my client. Or the problem is with the server.

I have spent hours looking at how to resolve this problem to no avail.
Perhaps by chance the Google programmers have a workaround which they
can share. IMHO, wine is not such a great platform to use for porting
Windows applications to Linux--I always have to fallback to
virtualization 'cuz i need those missing feautes.

[DanKegel]

On Jun 20, 11:24 am, Bob Smith <rwsmit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I can not run Picasa (and for that matter Wine) when my home folder is
> mounted using smbfs/cifs and the backend server is Samba v3.3. The
> problem appears to be related to the symbolic links in the ~/.google/
> picasa/3.0/dosdevices folder where the file names include the colon
> ":", eg. c:, d:, d::, etc. This wasn't problem in past when my home
> folder was NFS mounted.
>
> The server is Fedora 11 running Samba 3.3 and my workstation is
> running Ubuntu Karmic Koala (latest).

That's very interesting. I've posted a note to wine-devel to let them
know about the problem. Maybe we can find a workaround
(like having wine fall back to using underscores instead of colons).

Is this your personal network, or is some organization out there
actually
using cifs for mounting linux home directories? cifs hasn't been
commonly used for home directories in the past, to my knowledge.
- Dan

[DanKegel]

On Jun 21, 7:28 pm, DanKegel <daniel.r.ke...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I can not run Picasa (and for that matter Wine) when my home folder is
> > mounted using smbfs/cifs and the backend server is Samba v3.3. The
> > problem appears to be related to the symbolic links in the ~/.google/
> > picasa/3.0/dosdevices folder where the file names include the colon
> > ":", eg. c:, d:, d::, etc. This wasn't problem in past when my home
> > folder was NFS mounted.
>
> > The server is Fedora 11 running Samba 3.3 and my workstation is
> > running Ubuntu Karmic Koala (latest).
>
> That's very interesting.  I've posted a note to wine-devel to let them
> know about the problem.  Maybe we can find a workaround
> (like having wine fall back to using underscores instead of colons).

Please make sure the server has the CIFS Unix Extensions turned
on. I hear that is required for both symlinks and for filenames
containing
colons. Also make sure you're mounting with cifs rather than smbfs.
- Dan

[Robert Smith]

This is only one of the many reason that I am no fan of wine. I would much prefer that these symbolic links not reside in the directory space. Thanks for makeing wine-devel aware of this problem.

Supposedly the Unix Extensions in Samba were to permit the use of the seven reserved characters however this does not seem to be working for me. When I get a chance I will attempt to enable debugging of the session setup to verify if the unix extensions are beng negotiated and which capabilities (see http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/UNIX_Extensions).

This is my home network where I run three Samba+LDAP servers supporting Linux, Windows and OSX for my family. CIFS has been the default for the past couple of releases of Ubuntu and I prefer CIFS over NFS as I will move between workstations without logging out. I also use pam_mount.so to mount my personal home directory when I log in on any of the Linux computers.

Bob

--bs

--
Robert W. Smith
BISLink Internet Service

[Robert Smith]

Thanks, Dan.

Here is a snippet of my smb.conf for the Samba server serving the home shares:

[global]

  unix extensions = yes
  case sensitive = yes
  delete readonly = yes

  dos charset =
  unix charset = UTF8

[homes]

  path = /home/users/%U
  profile acls = Yes
  ea support = yes
  map archive = no
  map hidden = no
  map read only = no

I mount the home share under Ubuntu using pam_mount.so when I log in. Here is the pam_mount.conf.xml snippet:

<volume fstype="cifs" server="san01" path="%(USER)" mountpoint="~" options="soft,nomapchars" />

Here is what the man page for mount.cifs says for mapchar and nomapchar:

mapchars
  Translate six of the seven reserved characters (not backslash, but including the colon, question mark, pipe,
  asterik, greater than and less than characters) to the remap range (above 0xF000), which also allows the CIFS client
  to recognize files created with such characters by Windows´s POSIX emulation. This can also be useful when mounting
  to most versions of Samba (which also forbids creating and opening files whose names contain any of these seven
  characters). This has no effect if the server does not support Unicode on the wire.

nomapchars
  Do not translate any of these seven characters (default)

Also for completeness (I guess) 

> sudo cat /proc/fs/cifs/LinuxExtensionsEnabled
1

So with all that I still get the following:

rwsmith@pc-ubuntu-01:~$ > "colon:"
bash: colon:: No such file or directory

and 

rwsmith@pc-ubuntu-01:~$ ln -s ../rwsmith Symlink_to_myself
rwsmith@pc-ubuntu-01:~$ ls -ld Symlink_to_myself
lrwxrwxrwx 1 rwsmith rwsmith 10 2009-06-22 16:21 Symlink_to_myself -> ../rwsmith

rwsmith@pc-ubuntu-01:~$ cd Symlink_to_myself
rwsmith@pc-ubuntu-01:~/Symlink_to_myself$ pwd
/home/users/rwsmith/Symlink_to_myself


Looks like symlinks are working which might imply that Unix Extensions were negotiated? Is there any place to look to verify if the share session negotiate the Unix Extenstions and what capabilities were negotiated? 

I guess this is more of a Samba issue at this point but I have not heard a peep from my post on the Samba list.

Bob

--bs

[DanKegel]

On Jun 22, 1:24 pm, Robert Smith <rwsmit...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I mount the home share under Ubuntu using pam_mount.so when I log in. Here
> is the pam_mount.conf.xml snippet:
> <volume fstype="cifs" server="san01" path="%(USER)" mountpoint="~"
> options="soft,nomapchars" />

Aha. Try mapchars instead of nomapchars.
- Dan

[Robert Smith]

No, that didn't work either.

It turns out that several other applications are using reserved characters in filenames that they use within their respective .<app config dir> within the home directory. This now explains all of the other problems that I had when I migrated to using Samba shares for my home directory. Here is a list of applications that I found that are using the colon ":" character in configuration files in my home directory:

Evolution

Wine

Picasa (via wine)

VNC

Opera

Pulse Audio

Nautilus

Rhythmbox (if your track name has a colon)

Possibly many others.

I will repost to the Samba mailing list using a more dire subject like "Samba home shares breaks many applications"

In the meantime I have reverted back to using NFS for my home shares until I can sort this out further.

Thanks for your help.

Bob

--bs

[Robert Smith]

This has been identified as a problem as the Samba server unable to serve up files with an embedded colon. A fix has been put in place in Samba version 3.3.3. 

Bob

--bs

[DanKegel]

Woot! Congratulations on tracking it down. Do you have a bug link?

[Robert Smith]

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-announce/2009/000174.html

Bug #6196

Still waiting for version 3.3.3 (release announce above) or higher to be incorporated into FC11. 

--bs