Re: CONFIG_VFAT_FS_DUALNAMES regressions

[tridge@samba.org]

Hi Martin,

 > The question before that would be whether anyone has a comprehensive list 
 > of those tools, cause I think there are quite many. Well at least those 
 > from bigger vendors should be tested I think. Paragon, Symantec, ...

Do you happen to have any of those handy to test with?

 > And has it been tested with Linux tools such as fsck.msdos, fsck.vfat, 
 > parted and partimage? I think it probably has not much effect on parted and 
 > partimage, but what about the fscks?

I tested it with dosfstools (which provides the fsck.vfat on Linux
distros) and with mtools. Both required patches to work correctly. I
have submitted both patches to the maintainers of those packages.

The patch to dosfstools makes it skip the invalid 8.3 entries, just as
windows chkdsk does. The patch is here:

  http://samba.org/tridge/dosfstools.patch1

The patch to mtools is partly cosmetic, and partly to fix a bug in the
VFAT checksum routine. The code in mtools incorrectly treated a nul
byte as special in 8.3 directory entries. The patch is here:

  http://samba.org/tridge/mtools.patch1

 > Thus even when the patch only changes the values stored for new - or 
 > rewritten? - files it actively corrupts the meta consistency of the whole 
 > filesystem. To me it is like inserting a defective inode into a consistent 
 > Linux filesystem.

If the windows implementation is taken as the reference implementation
then the files are not considered defective. The windows chkdsk will
(with a small probability) complain of duplicates, but it doesn't
complain about the entries being defective in any other way.

 > I don't believe that Microsoft is still providing updates for Win98. But I 
 > think Windows 2000 might still be in use - I for example have a Win 2000 
 > installation on my ThinkPad T23, although I didn't boot it for about a 
 > year or so. Has it been tested against Windows 2000? I digged for the mail 
 > where you said something about against which Windows versions you tested, 
 > but I didn't find it anymore.

I haven't tested against w2k yet. I'll need to dig through my old MSDN
CD stack and see if I can find a w2k CD to test with. It's no longer
offered on current MSDN subscriptions.

Cheers, Tridge