samba: Access Time of File is set to far future: Access: 30828-09-14 04:48:05.477580700 +0200

[Matthias Loose]

Description: Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS
Release: 20.04
Samba Ver: 2:4.13.14+dfsg-0ubuntu0.20.04.2

I run Ubuntu 20.04 and have several Samba shares. After the recent update from samba 4.11 to 4.13 this new behavior was observed.

If I edit a freshly copied MP3 file (to the share) with Mp3Tag (program) from my windows box, the file became unreadable by VLC. Copying them back and forth or just on the share made them readable again. The Mp3Tag Software has worked flawlessly before.

If I copy the file in question on the share itself it just works again. They have the same checksum, so virtually the same. After some googling I found my answer. If you stat the freshly edited file, this is what turns up:

  File: bohemian-edit.mp3
  Size: 6041182 Blocks: 11245 IO Block: 1048576 regular file
Device: 33h/51d Inode: 198862 Links: 1
Access: (0774/-rwxrwxr--) Uid: ( 1000/ twister) Gid: ( 1000/ twister)
Access: 30828-09-14 04:48:05.477580700 +0200
Modify: 2021-11-27 20:22:05.624000000 +0100
Change: 2021-11-27 20:22:04.156312647 +0100
 Birth: -

After a touch, the file becomes readable again by VLC.
Theres a bug filed over at Debian, that looks to be the same issue: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=998355

Since they are talking about Samba 4.13 I checked my dpkg.log file and low and behold some weeks ago Ubuntu 20.04 upgraded from 4.11 to 4.13. So Im pretty convinced its Sambas fault.

What you expected to happen:
After editing a MP3 file on the share to have a valid atime.

What happened instead:
After editing a MP3 file on the share via Mp3Tag the file receives an invalid atime, rendering it unreadable my many programs.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Lucas Kanashiro (lucaskanashiro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. I appreciate the quality of this bug report and I'm sure it will be helpful to others experiencing the same issue.

This sounds like an upstream bug to me. I do not see any patch in Ubuntu nor Debian that might be related to this issue. The best route to getting it fixed in Ubuntu in this case would be to file an bug with the upstream project. Otherwise, I am not sure what we can do directly in Ubuntu to fix the problem.

If you do end up filing an upstream bug, please link to it from here. Thanks!

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

From the Debian bug report it sounds like this issue was resolved upstream in version 4.14.11 or 4.15.3 or higher. Kinetic includes 4.16, but presumably focal and jammy are affected. I think steps to reproduce would be required to be identified before considering SRU, but I've opened the bug tasks for those releases.

[Lucas Kanashiro (lucaskanashiro)]

Any detailed steps to reproduce this bug so we can confirm it is impacting Focal and Jammy? And maybe work towards a SRU.