Samba weirdness, files missing??? – 1029 days old

[krazykanuk36]

I have had Samba setup and working for a while. One of the Samba shares I have setup is MP3s (which is actually located at /stuff/MP3) I have started to go through all the MP3's and make sure it a good copy and then add a directory for artist name and then another inside artist name for album name if there is enough MP3's for that artist to warrant separating them by album. We share these amongst the trusted users (the untrusted user is not given any access, limit access by IP address). My girlfriend has started to tell me lately that there are some missing (I look at her like she loosing her mind) and check samba,syslog,messages logs and there nothing about files being deleted, even gone as far as checking all windows computers virus programs log to see if a computer gave a false positive as a virus and deleted some MP3's, so far I have found nothing. This MP3 share is used for filling MP3 players and iPods. When I copied from /stuff/MP3 to /stuff/MP3/artist-name using Windows I was told it was coping 50 files, I knew this number was incorrect for this specific artist. I then plugged her MP3 player into my laptop and copied from the MP3 player to /stuff/MP3/artist-name and it copied 126 files (selected Copy and Replace if file existed from Windows) so now maybe she not loosing her mind even though she is getting OLD ;-). Am I looking in the wrong log files or there anything else I should be checking on why files are showing up missing on the MP3s share? Or am I doing something wrong maybe?

[Grogan]

I've noticed shit like that happening accessing music from windows computers though samba shares and I thought it was something in the metadata and Windows not copying them. Check some of the ones that don't show up. It could also be characters in the filenames causing it.

I never did pursue it... I really don't listen to music in Windows anyway so I just didn't bother using samba. If I need to mount something I just use NFS between Linux computers.

[krazykanuk36]

Other then the first artist I noticed was missing files I not noticed it anymore, but that could just be I don't know exactly how many files each artist had. I thought of something else as well though. Is there a limit on how many files can be in one directory? For I am still sorting and there is 3300+ files left in the MP3 directory and I have moved hundreds out into artist name sub directories.

[Grogan]

There's no hard limit I don't think, but perhaps samba does barf and give up when there's too many.

It could also be limits, like exceeding the number of open files. Windows is an asshole... it's probably going to access every stinking one of those files in view in a file manager to show icons or info.

Check logs for clues (e.g. system log, samba log)