Querying for ownership of file shared by Samba fails with "MemoryError: allocating SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR"

[Roger Upole]

"Middle Fork GIS" <middleforkgis at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:943c8e0b0909231216t1c590b14u453855718352953 at mail.gmail.com...
>I have just learned how to use the win32security module (within Windows, of
> course) to determine file ownership.  When running against local drives or
> windows shares, this works fine, as shown in the following code (Python
> 2.4/2.5 with PyWin extensions):
>
> import win32security
> file = 'c:/temp/test.txt'
> #Using the win32security module get ownership information
> ownerSecurity=
> win32security.GetFileSecurity(file,win32security.OWNER_SECURITY_INFORMATION)
> ownerSID = ownerSecurity.GetSecurityDescriptorOwner ()
> owner,domain,type = win32security.LookupAccountSid (None, ownerSID)
> print "File %s is owned by %s\\%s" % (file,domain,owner)
>
>
> However, when I run this against a file on an SMB mounted file system (the
> server is AIX Unix),the following error is raised:
>
>
> File
> "C:\Python24\Lib\site-packages\pythonwin\pywin\framework\scriptutils.py",
> line 325, in RunScript
> exec codeObject in __main__.__dict__
>
> File "C:\scripts\testfileinfo.py", line 17, in ?
> ownerSecurity=
> win32security.GetFileSecurity(file,win32security.OWNER_SECURITY_INFORMATION)
>
> MemoryError: allocating SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR
>
> ============================
>
> Interestingly, searching the G**gle for the string
> "MemoryError: allocating SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR" results in only two primary
> hits, back to 2003, which look like this:
>
>> Anyone have any ideas on what the problem might be here (M: is a
>> Win98 shared disk space - command was issued from a PythonWin
>> session running on a Win 2000 machine):
>>
>> >>> GetFileSecurity("M:\\autoexec.bat", OWNER_SECURITY_INFORMATION)
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>> File "<interactive input>", line 1, in ?
>> MemoryError: allocating SECURITY_DESCRIPTOR
>>
>>Win95,98,ME use the FAT32 filesystem. This has absolutely no ACL or
>>permission capabilities on it. Win NT, 2K, XP use NTFS by default,
>>which allows ACLS.
>
> Any insights would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Steve Walker
> middleforkgis aht gmail.com
>

If I remember correctly, GetFileSecurity can work unpredictably with file 
systems that
don't support ACL's.  Try using win32security.GetNamedSecurityInfo instead.

          Roger