On 2010-07-30, at 12:11, Trond Myklebust wrote:
> Your Mac has a perfectly functional CIFS client, as do your Linux boxes.
> They both interoperate just fine with Samba, and would presumably
> continue to do so if someone were to decide to reuse the ctime field on
> your Samba box as storage for a create time.

CIFS doesn't support symlinks (they just appear as the referenced file), so I've had applications that scan the filesystem recurse indefinitely due to symlinked directories on a CIFS share appearing as hard-linked directories on the client.  This doesn't happen when the filesystem is accessed via NFS.

Cheers, Andreas