Comment 28 for bug 95460

I'm pretty disheartened that this bug is still characterized "needs info" on the top. To synthesize the comments (and my own experiences):

1. Samba as released on Feisty doesn't play nicely with the values "msdfs proxy = yes" or "msdfs proxy = no" in smb.conf. Boolean values appear to be illegal for this configuration option anyway.

2. At least one GUI -- KControl -- unconditionally adds one of the two lines to every share, rendering it (the share) useless. SWAT may also have this problem. (Perhaps Samba changed the syntax of this option during development?)

3. It is possible that this assumption is built into a separate process that handles upgrades. (This happened to me as I upgraded from Edgy, as it did to several others. I don't know if the above line was inserted in the upgrade or if the older version of Samba was just ignoring it. Regardless, you can't fix it from the GUI -- KControl adds it in unconditionally.)

4. MSDFS is a distributed filesystem feature that is unlikely to be used in a SOHO or home environment, where the GUI Is most likely to be used. Conversely, as people above have pointed out, administrators who know enough about Samba and CIFS to be using this feature are much less likely to use the GUI, preferring to edit it by hand. In any event, the GUI is _forcing_ them to hand-maintain their configuration file in the current regime...along with everyone else who is having this problem, many of which (like me) just wanted things to work without thinking about it too much.

From this information, the course of action seems obvious to me: patch KControl to, at a minimum, disable MSDFS options and not write the "msdfs proxy" line to smb.conf. Actually providing MSDFS management capability through the GUI would be nice; but users who run a distributed file system in production are much less likely to be using a basic GUI to maintain their Samba configuration file. Too much depends on them knowing exactly how that file works and what's in it.

A stretch goal would be to actually fix KControl to handle this option appropriately, but to fix this defect, all that's required is that KControl not break the application it purports to configure.

I understand that more important bugs probably exist in Ubuntu that demand attention, but I'm sad that this bug doesn't appear to have had even rudimentary triage, ever, and it predates the end of beta.* If there is already a bug filed on KControl tracking this elsewhere in the Ubuntu universe, please mark this as a duplicate so we can track the appropriate bug. Actually, any acknowledgment that this bug report has been read and appreciated by developers would be nice. Thanks.

* Does that mean that Feisty shipped before some of the bugs filed against it in beta were even _read_? That seems out of character for this distribution, but I have to say, I'm disheartened by the deafening silence from developers or QA on this bug (except Ralph Janke's unrelated comment on the tone of Lithium's post). I hope that it's simply an unmarked duplicate, personally. Prove me right. :)