Well the title is a bit misleading…..here are the details. I found out that if you have a NTFS native shared directory on your server, everything works fine as long as you’re using OSX 10.5 (Leopard) or below as a client. You can move files from Leopard and/or Tiger clients to the share and as long as you don’t mind the ._ files everything works.
Well something new has been introduced in Snow Leopard that kinda breaks this. If you have a Snow Leopard client machine accessing a NTFS native shared directory (via smb), by default the shares are mounted with the new xattr (Extended Attribute) feature, instead of those “old” ._ files. This messes everything up if you’re in a mixed environment with 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6 clients all accessing files in a NTFS native smb share.
Snow Leopards version of samba will read those old resource fork files, but files uploaded or modified by the Snow Leopard client will be unrecognizable by the older samba clients (10.5-) as far as the resource fork goes. This introduces some problems with programs that use the resource fork to store information.
All this headache is related to the ‘NTFS Streams’ feature of SMB mounts, so if we disable that, everything goes back to normal. To do this you have to create a file named /etc/nsmb.conf on all your 10.6 clients with the following contents:
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[default]
streams=no
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