Raymond Chen claims Explorer won’t show more than 100 files in a directory served up by Samba.

What’s Samba? The popular network file serving (NFS) software that enables UNIX, Linux, IBM System 390, OpenVMS, and other servers to dish out files for Windows clients.

[Western Digital WDXE3200JB]It’s widely deployed on networks and embedded in Network Attached Storage devices… from enterprise-level to the cute little external hard drives you can pick up at places like Sam’s and Costco. In other words, Samba is everywhere.

So who’s Raymond Chen? He’s one of Microsoft’s oldest, bestest dogs. His Wikipedia bio reads:

Raymond Juimong Chen is a well-known developer on the Windows Shell team at Microsoft, having been there since 1992. He had previously worked on OS/2. He writes a blog, popular among software developers, called The Old New Thing, mainly explaining the history of Windows and his own experience in ensuring its backwards compatibility.He is noted for his ‘Psychic Debugging’ series of articles, as well as the two most useful types of thought experiments in software design: “Imagine if this were possible” and “What if two programs did this?”

Before his career at Microsoft and lasting even into 1995, Raymond Chen identified himself as “just another Linux hacker” in his Usenet sig.

In other words, Raymond knows Windows and Raymond knows Linux. And Raymond says the problem rears its ugly head only when Windows Vista’s Explorer fast queries a Samba drive.

So why haven’t you seen this problem before? Because XP and earlier Windows versions could only perform slow queries. Thus, as Samba is a reverse-engineered project viewed by Microsoft as a competitor, it had no particular need or ability to robustly handle fast queries until recently.

The Good News: The current Samba release, 3.0.22, handles fast queries correctly. If you’re running earlier versions, you need to update anyway. Samba 3.0.21 exposes the clear text of the server’s machine account credentials in the winbind log files when the log level is set to 5 or higher.

The Bad News: If you’re running any Network Attached Storage or portable hard disks, you’ll have to either:

  • Chase down your supplier(s) for flash ROM updates;
  • Resign yourself to not deploying Windows Vista, or;
  • Redeploy the offending device(s) to non-Vista segments.

Come to think of it… If history’s any guide, you won’t be deploying Vista till two or three years after its commercial release. So you might as well wait till today’s Samba drives die a natural death.

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