Not specific to Maemo or our beloved n900's by any means, but does anyone know how to disable file preallocation on Samba?

I've searched through all the documentation and a bunch of threads that discuss the issue and found nothing, but I thought some of the great minds here might have figured it out.

For those who are wondering - Samba preallocates files per client request. That is, if you drag and drop a 500mb file from your PC to samba on your phone, it'll start by extending the new file to 500mb before even copying any data. On ext3, not a problem - a sparse file is instantly created. On fat32, it zeroes out every last byte. This takes a while, so for large files causes a CIFS timeout.

I'd prefer not to switch MyDocs and mmc1 to ext3 as I occasionally mount them on a Windows box via USB mass storage mode.

"strict allocate = no", but that's the default. Your problem is that FAT32 doesn't support sparse files :-(

Maybe use another protocol for large transfer?

Yeah, seems we're out of luck. Apparently Windows Explorer requests the preallocation, and won't proceed unless the file's the expected size. Which means anything samba does to work around that would be a nasty hack.

I guess I'll just compromise and format one of my storage areas to ext4...