Linux – Watching a Samba share for modifications from Linux

linuxnotificationssamba

I'm trying to monitor a remote Windows Share for changes (the server can be an actual Windows machine or a Linux machine with Samba server). AFAIK the SMB protocol supports a kind of event-based notification:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj216044.aspx

And I can find it implemented server-side in Samba in the change_notify option in smb.conf.

My question is: how can I watch for such events from the client side from a Linux machine? I'd like to setup something that works in a fashion similar to inotifywait and be notified with an event when the content of files on the share changes, or when files are created, deleted or moved.

Best Answer

an idea is to use Inotify on linux to monitor changing on filesystem.

As SAMBA 3.0.23 (http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_3.0_Features_added/changed), the protocol now support Inotify, server site, to notify compatible client of filesystem changing.

But, as https://lkml.org/lkml/2007/4/7/129, seems that actually CIFS client does not support correctly Inotify.

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Looks like you have the wide links setting to yes, which is what got me recently.

It's probably due to the permissions on /some/directory, following your example above.

If you don't want to change the file permissions, then you need to tell Samba to use a different local user for that share. That's really your only two options.

I think the force user and force group options is what you want. You will not have an optimum security situation if you force user to root, but it may be what you are looking for.

Linux – Can’t access Linux Samba share from OSX

In Finder, choose Go -> Connect to Server, and in the server address box enter

smb://somedomain%5csomeuser@someserver/path/to/data

  somedomain is the domain you log in via as if logged onto the windows machine, 
  someuser is your user id, 
  someserver is server hosting the share you're trying to access
  /path/to/data is the rest of the path to the location you want

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