Whereas the behaviour of the parameter "STORE DOS ATTRIBUTES" was working as expected and described in Samba V3.0.x, its behaviour changed in a very strange way with V3.2.x and later. With V3.2.x and later the parameter is ignored (or to be precise deactivated) if the parent directory of the shared directory does not support extended attributes as well. 

The problem comes with the following code (smbd/dosmode.c) that was introduced with V3.2.x:

sizeret = SMB_VFS_GETXATTR(conn, path, SAMBA_XATTR_DOS_ATTRIB, attrstr, sizeof(attrstr));
if (sizeret == -1) {
  if (errno == ENOSYS
#if defined(ENOTSUP)
      || errno == ENOTSUP) {
#else
   ) {
#endif
     DEBUG(1,("get_ea_dos_attributes: Cannot get attribute from EA on file %s: Error = %s\n", path, strerror(errno) ));                                                       
     set_store_dos_attributes(SNUM(conn), False);
   }                                                   
   return False;
}

Since Windows is trying to retrieve the attributes of the parent directory when accessing the shared directory. In this case the SMB_VFS_GETXATTR call returns 95 (ENOTSUP) and the STORE DOS ATTRIBUTES will be disabled.

In V3.0.x that piece of code was completely different:

sizeret = SMB_VFS_GETXATTR(conn, path, SAMBA_XATTR_DOS_ATTRIB, attrstr, sizeof(attrstr));
if (sizeret == -1) {
#if defined(ENOTSUP) && defined(ENOATTR)
  if ((errno != ENOTSUP) && (errno != ENOATTR) && (errno != EACCES) && (errno != EPERM)) {
    DEBUG(1,("get_ea_dos_attributes: Cannot get attribute from EA on file %s: Error = %s\n", path, strerror(errno) ));                                                       
    set_store_dos_attributes(SNUM(conn), False);                                            
  }                                                   
#endif
  return False;
}

When accessing path=./.. the ENOTSUP error is ignored by that code and everthing is working fine.

I guess that the behaviour of V3.2.x (and later) isn't the intended one.

Yours sincerely
Hans Lampl