Lets assume today is 26.9.2003 (26th of September 2003). The original file in WindowsXP has the following date values: Created: 23.9.2003 Modified: 21.9.2003 Accessed: 26.9.2003 Now, I copy that file inside WindowsXP to another folder. E.g. from C:\ to C:\TEMP and it will get the following values: Created: 26.9.2003 Modified: 21.9.2003 Accessed: 26.9.2003 Notice how the created field changes. Now again I take the original file and copy it via samba to linux (redhat 9): Created: 21.9.2003 Modified: 21.9.2003 Accessed: 21.9.2003 How come the created date is in the past? If I try to think logically then isn't it so that when I copy file to linux via samba, a new file is created? And when new file is created then isn't it logical that the creation date is today and not in the past? Using the modified date affects at least some backup scripts. E.g. You have a backup script to take incremental backup of all the files which have changed since the last backup. If the last backup time was 25th of Semptemer then it will look for files which are newer than 25th of Semptember and of course it doesn't backup any files which are copied to linux via samba because their date is in the past. I'm not sure that this is a "bug". It really depends how you see things. I tried to look into smb.conf values, but I couldn't find anything that would allow me to change this behaviour.
posix doersn't store the creation time. This is one of the differences between posix and NTFS file system semantics. So smbd has to fake the creation date based on one of the other timestamp values (see the stat man page for details).
Yes, I understand posix doesn't support creation time. I am just wondering why smbd uses the modified time and not current date? I don't see the logic behind that solution. E.g. If you have file foo.txt: Sep 29 09:01 foo.txt Now you say "cp foo.txt bar.txt" it becomes: 0 Sep 29 09:02 bar.txt So when file is copied (inside linux or windows) the creation/modification date is the current date. I think we can agree on that :). But samba doesn't work like that. Even though new file is created, it uses the modified date information. If today is 1st of Semptember 2003 then the file in windows might have it's modified time 1st of January 2003. Now when that file is copied to linux via samba, samba uses that modified information. In my opinion linux and windows use the same logic, but samba does not. That is why I first reported this "bug". Is there some reason you cannot use the current date when file is copied to windows? If this is not considered as a bug, maybe this could be added as feature request. Maybe parameter in smb.conf to define whether to use the modified timestamp or use current timestamp.
database cleanup