Samba and Windows Explorer Refresh
 

Hi all,

I've got a Samba 3.0.9 Server (Suse 9.1) which acts as NT4 PDC and shares some folders. In Windows Explorer these folders do not actualize automatically on changes in this folder. If I hit F5 the changes are visible directly, but without F5 I'll never see any changes. Even if I delete some files on the share in Windows Explorer the files do not get deleted (visually) until I press F5.
Maybe there's anything little I've done wrong... please would you point me? :-)

Thanks alot,
//mc_le

In order for windows explorer (or any other program) to see changes to a samba share, it must re-request the directory listing from the server.

As stated before, this is a problem with the client, not your samba server. I've found that a quick change to the windows client registry solves this problem. Change the following key to 0 (it was set to 1 on my system originally.)

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Update\UpdateMode

After a quick restart, you should notice that explorer will update automatically. Note: this will result in a slight increase of requests to the samba server (most likely.) Keep that in mind if you are doing this on a large network.

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