Samba: permission denied on nested directory creation

I have a network setup where there is a Unbuntu (9.04, Jaunty) Samba/CIFS file server with Ubuntu and Windows clients. I had this annoying issue where, from Linux clients, recursive directory creation -- like mkdir -p /share/a/b/c would not work. In order to get /share/a/b/c you'd have to create each directory in turn: mkdir /share/a && mkdir /share/a/b && mkdir /share/a/b/c. This prevents handy commands like mkdir -p and rsync from working. Fortuantely, I finally found a work-around: turn off Samba's Unix extensions on the server. i.e.

[global]
...
unix extensions = no
...

Obviously this only helps if you don't need the Unix extensions (symlinks, hardlinks, etc on the share), but I didn't. This sounds like a bug in the CIFS client for Linux, but who knows. I'm pleased to have any work-around.

References

• Report of this issue from Feb-2009
• Gentoo bug about this