MacOS Spotlight Client-Side Searching Broken by Samba Response

[Andrew]

Ubuntu version: 22.10
Samba version: Version 4.16.4-Ubuntu (2:4.16.4+dfsg-2ubuntu1)

When searching a Samba share with a MacOS client, incorrect response from Samba leads to disabled client side searching even though server side searching is unavailable. Completely unable to search from a MacOS client in this circumstance (no results will be returned).

In instances where server side searching is unavailable, client side searching should be available.

See https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15086.

Bug fixed upstream in Samba 4.16.5 (see: https://www.samba.org/samba/history/samba-4.16.5.html).

[Lucas Kanashiro (lucaskanashiro)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and trying to make Ubuntu better.

This is the commit merged upstream which fixes this issue:

https://gitlab.com/samba-team/samba/-/commit/23e6e50c0f82b997dea4a67069f65252045514c0

This is affecting Kinetic and Jammy, we would need to make sure whether this bug is present in older releases.

[Michał Małoszewski (michal-maloszewski99)]

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for your report.
I analyzed this problem and bumped into some issues.
I have used the commit referenced above to solve that bug, but it turned out that it does not cherry-pick cleanly. It means that there have been other changes upstream, that change the context of the patch - this makes it hard to apply and risky as there might be side effects. The fix is too complicated to make - as is - progress on it right now due to all the churn.

According to the SRU policy, we should only fix something which will not regress other aspects.
But backporting this patch rings all alarm bells.

We’d need to modify this and potentially find more patches to make it apply cleanly and with the confidence of not regressing. Given that we can’t reproduce, no one else chimed in and that it is hard to solve as-is we can not make progress right now.

I’d be happy to support if there is a volunteer identifying these changes and providing a reviewable change to the packaging that is supposed to fix this issue - that can be built/tested and passed into the SRU processing.

It would also help to have more exact steps to reproduce (without MacOS). The steps are necessary, because the person investigating the bug may not be as familiar with that case as you are. It is possible that these steps could help us to figure out some workaround to help with that problem.

Sorry, but since I can’t resolve it right now I’ll unassign myself waiting for those steps and/or proposed changes.

[Andrew (caeci11iusad1)]

This is now fixed in Ubuntu 22.10 with deployment of Samba 4.16.8 (confirmed against MacOS 13.2.1).

[Utkarsh Gupta (utkarsh)]

Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) has reached end of life, so this bug will not be fixed for that specific release.