[OpenAFS-devel] Case sensitive filenames on Windows

[Marc Dionne]

The AFS client could handle some forms of case sensitivity better, but
in the end you're dealing with a case-insentive OS, and depending on
being able to differentiate 'TEST' and 'test' reliably from Windows is
probably not a good idea.

When dealing with multiple files that differ only in case, I think there
are 3 situations with respect to the AFS client:

1) The client receives the actual case-sensitive path name specified by
the user.  In this case the client could be fixed to retrieve the
correct file or directory.  (mainly an issue with the dnlc cache)

2) The client doesn't get the intended path, but there are hints as to
what the intended path is from previous SMB requests (directory search,
query of file information).

3) In some cases the client simply has no way to know what the intended
path was, because some level of caching on the SMB client side has
changed the initial request.

Experimenting with some fixes to 1) and 2) shows that the client can
probably be made to reliably handle mixed case files on Win2K, but it
might not be possible to do so for folders.  In many cases, particularly
when using the Explorer, the exact folder name you clicked on just never
gets to the AFS client.  At least for me, this doesn't work any better
in Samba than it does in AFS.

Marc

Carsten Jacobi wrote:
> 
> Hi there!
> 
> We just have problems here accessing files in directories
> that were created using different cases (upper/lower) in their
> naming. For example, if we create the directories
> 
> test
> TEST
> TeSt
> 
> we'll see only the contents of one of these directories (from
> Unix all three directories have different contents, from
> Windows we see the same contents in all three directories).
> Now, when we export AFS using a Samba-Server with case sensitive
> shares the directories are handled correctly also from Windows.