Strange CIFS Behavior

[Siva_7]

We mount shares from a Windows server. In some, but not all directories on the share, we can 'cat' the contents of files. In the directories where the 'cat' of a file fails, after doing a long listing (ls -l filename), a second attempt to 'cat' the file succeeds.

We are on CIFS 02.02.01

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

I will assume this is an HP-UX server.

This behavior might be corrected by updating the CIFS version on HP-UX.

http://software.hp.com
Search for CIFS
Get the latest server and client depots.

Install the server depot.
Then install the client depot and plan a reboot because this is required.

There may also be patching needs on the Windows server which need to be met.

This may be a problem with file caching on the windows side.

SEP

[Eric Raeburn]

Siva,

This is Eric from HP. I worked in the HP CIFS Client software team for some seven years (until about a year ago) and do not recall anyone reporting this problem. From your description, I believe the only way to resolve this is through an official call to HP Support, which I urge you to do. There is no obvious reason for the behavior you are seeing--it's going to take some dedicated debugging. Support can guide you in methods of enabling appropriate log levels to get debug traces from the cifs client logfile.

One thing you might try, but I don't think the version of the Client you are using will respond to this: after the 'cat' fails, try it again, before doing any other activity on the mountpoint. That is, try 'cat' again before doing 'ls' (or anything else). If the second 'cat' succeeds (again, I doubt it will), pass that information on to support. Other things to note before calling: (1) Is it always the same files or directories that cause the problem? (2) Are the affected files located in a distributed file system (DFS)?

Good luck. Sorry there's no simple fix,
-Eric


P.S. Regarding the suggestion to update the software: updating the CIFS Client to A.02.02.02 is a good idea. You can read about the changes here:
http://docs.hp.com/en/B8724-90105/ar01s02.html
There's no need to install the CIFS Server--that software is an independent package completely unrelated to this issue.