I'm using cifs 1.56 backport on Debian Lenny. Finally I can copy files and the dates and times are preserved, but only under certain conditions: Novell Netware volume (CIFS) mounted on my Debian box: 1. cp -pr /etc/someoldir /nwmount/. DOES preserve the file timestamps, but NOT directory timestamps 2. The Gnome file manager DOES NOT preserve file or directory timestamps at all WinXP drive mounted on my Debian box: 1. cp -pr /etc/someoldir /wxpmount/. ALL WORKS as expected 2. The Gnome file manager DOES NOT preserve file or directory timestamps ------------------------------------------------------- Note: CentOS 5.3 using cifs v 1.54 behaves the same as above with the exception that Gnome file manager DOES preserve directory and file timestamps when copying to a WinXP share. ------------------------------------------------------- Using smbfs on a SLES-10 box works as expected for all of the above operations. Thus far cifs is dysfunctional for my purposes and I just don't use it. It's frustrating having to check timestamps after using any utility that copies/modifies files and directories on a cifs share. If smbfs is on my distro, then I'll use that, if only cifs is available, then I use NFS.
I tried reproducing this on Ubuntu 14.04LTS using current kernel cifs.ko and don't see any problems with using gnome file manager to copy a directory tree to Windows and didn't see any issues with file or directory time stamps (also don't see any issues with cp -pr) It is possible that Novell has a cifs server bug that doesn't honor setting directory timestamps using the normal protocol semantics, but if so we would need a wireshark (or tcpdump or netmon or equivalent) trace file to see if the server ignored the setfileinfo or setpathinfo CIFS protocol request. See e.g. https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/LinuxCIFS_troubleshooting and https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Capture_Packets
Please provide network traces if you still see this problem on reasonably current Linux kernels (from the last few years)