People, be aware of long paths
This week held one of the surprises, one never needs. To make it short:
The Windows Explorer isn't able to handle paths with more than 256 chars.
The behaviour of this piece of software is of course not unique, the messages vary from a simple Could not copy file
, over a The file couldn't be removed
(during a copy process!) until the (rather correct) Path to long
-message. The best thing was, that it did nothing, when you navigated through your folders and double clicked the last one, that was responsible for the path length to be over 256 chars. At the beginning I was a little bit in panic, because I thought that the new Linux softraid (Mirroring) that was on the server was corrupt and later I thought it was a bug in the samba software, but now I'm happy that it was “only” the clients fault.
And now some information for $searchengine and for all the other admins: If you samba logfile contains the message NT_STATUS_OBJECT_PATH_NOT_FOUND, check the query path length, because the windows client cuts the path to a length of 256 chars. In the path length the driver letter or the sharing name is included.
Because I had no Vista by hand, I currently only could assign this failure to Windows XP´s Explorer (OS is on current patch level). Maybe someone using Vista can create some long paths and give me a hint if it works.
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