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We've mounted a CIFS share from a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine on an RHEL 4u6 box, as 'cifs' filesystem, with full permissions on both the Windows and Linux sides so that it is possible to write to the mounted filesystem on Linux. However, we can't successfully touch files in the filesystem:

touch: setting times of `/mnt/testhub/testfile': Permission denied

What is the reason that touch fails? I've seen that for instance vim, on other hand, is able to update file modification times.

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I have cifs mounted via debian and ubuntu and touch works correctly. Due to the error it does sound like permissions or virus software blocking it but do not have a direct answer to your question. –  pablo Feb 18 '11 at 10:10
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I found the reason, by fooling around. It turns out that files are created with root as the owner and 755 for permissions. I'm in the owning group, but as it has only read access touch is not able to update the file after creating it :)

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