How do you track files in SMB with an application?

Question

I have built an application with PHP which shows all the files in the home directory of a user this directory is also available via samba so you can access it from the native explorer in windows, mac and linux. I wanted to give every file an ID so that I can asign tags to every file how would you go about doing this? Would you make hashs of the file and look whether its the same filehash and would thus conclude that its the same file?

Can I trigger samba to send out something everytime a file or folder gets moved?

Answer 1

If your platform is Linux and the installation is fairly recent, you can use inotify to have your PHP code called when filesytem changes are made. See this portion of the PHP manual:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/book.inotify.php

The basic usage would be to add a watcher on the Samba directory or directories with a callback to your PHP code. For performance reasons, it would be a good idea to see if inotify can be told only to send the types of updates your interested in to your code.

Note however that inotify will drop updates/messages after a certain period of time. So you will have problems keeping things in sync at some point in time. One solution would be to use inotify on an ongoing basis along with periodically doing a full scan of each home to verify it reflects your database (or wherever the tags are stored).

Answer 2

To answer your first question, making a hash would of course work. Simply using md5 on the files would be sufficient. The chances of a collision while hashing the files in your home directory are insanely small. IMO I would say not even worth mentioning. And it probably goes without saying but... I would store at least the hash and the full path, so you can deal with moved files appropriately, and actually do something with the file.