Hello all,

I've been stumped for days with offloading my calendarserver data files onto my Nexenta-based storage server. While I'd ideally like to have the storage box directly serving these files, I'd kill for at least being able to copy over a backup. But since the geniuses at Apple decided to ridiculously overcomplicate their software with extensive use of obfuscated data in extended attributes, that's no small feat. With kernel and filesystem support for xattr going back several years on all the major operating systems, I never would have guessed that userland tool support would be so completely non-existent. However, thanks to the awesomeness of ZFS and the robust xattr support in network filesystems, I should still be ok, right?

zfs get xattr reports 'on' for the location where I wish to store the files (and everywhere else for that matter) runat anyfile followed by ls yields "SUNWattr_ro SUNWattr_rw" and I can create/edit/delete more 'files' without root.

But working with xattr over the various file-sharing protocols (with user_xattr specified in mount options) spits back "Operation not supported." rsync --version reports 'no xattr' in capabilities (and holds true to that report) despite being the same version as my Ubuntu box which does support them. In short, I haven't been able to find a single way to even for a one-time operation transplant these files to a non-local-ext3 location without stripping away the xattrs (which renders the files useless). There's a lot of calendar data there for several users already, so I really need to at least be able to make a usable backup.

So, as it currently stands, ZFS supports xattr, and that support appears to be enabled and working. Yet a large number of mature applications that have also claimed xattr support for a long time seem oblivious to the existence of this underlying support, and Samba even fails when told to store extended attributes in a database file.

Is there a fundamental problem with ZFS's xattr support that renders it incompatible with everyone else's? What is it going to take to properly handle xattrs over network shares, and if that isn't possible, what is? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed.

Cheers,
- HonoredMule

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