[SAGE] Re: Help with Office / Samba samba-2.2.7a on FreeBSD 4.9-RC

[Leeland Artra <leeland@heronetwork.com>]

Greetings,

Thanks to everyone who helped out with this.

For those of you who are interested (and to make sure there is a record in the 
list archives) here is what we went through:

1 - All kinds of changing of settings for caching, masks, modes, etc.
     -> lots of interesting reading in the smb.con manual but
        although learned a lot about various settings no luck.

2 - begging for help on the lists and IRC bands.
     -> Heard rumors about possible "others" with similiar
        problems solved by moving off to a real Windows
        server. I'm too stubborn and cheap to do that.
     -> Also got lots of suggestions to RTFM... Really people
        that kind of suggestion is not helpful nor funny except
        to the crass idiot who typed it.
     -> In the end no help. Lots of sympathy (Thanks!)

3 - Upgraded to latest patch level of Samab 2.2 series (2.2.8a)
     -> No help but things seemed to fail a little faster... :^)

4 - At Rich Webb's (rwebb@wmis.net) suggestion we started playing
     with the oplock settings.
     -> This had little effect on the system but it did lead us
        to the ACL controls.

ACL lists controls were the key! Never thought to look there, assumed the 
defaults were ok.

The problem was with "nt acl support". The current versions of Samba have 
serious issues with ACLs. Why this was not affecting us earlier, we still have 
no clue. The assumption is that a recent "security patch" from MS to the XP 
boxes adjusted how the ACL system was being used.

Also although the Samba docs and install trumpets that ACLs are broken the 
default setting for nt acl support is Yes!! Which is backwards as far as I am 
concerned. Until ACLs are fixed that setting should properly be defaulted to No 
so that this kind of thing isn't affecting other sites that are running on the 
defaults assuming that those would be "sane" and at least "safe".

In the end we figured out the following settings in the Global area. Note that 
the "profile acls = Yes" as this fixes another ACL problem with roaming 
profiles (which we use a lot).

# ACLs are broken so make sure they stay off for now.
acl compatibility =
force unknown acl user = 00
inherit acls = No
nt acl support = No
# This fixes a small bug in roaming profiles by "faking" the right ACL
profile acls = Yes

# Locking settings
kernel oplocks = Yes
lock spin count = 3
lock spin time = 10
oplock break wait time = 0
lock dir = /var/lock
blocking locks = Yes
fake oplocks = No
locking = Yes
oplocks = Yes
level2 oplocks = Yes
oplock contention limit = 2
posix locking = Yes
strict locking = No


Cheers,
Leeland


Original message included for search results:
> 
> System: FreeBSD 4.9-RC
> Samba: 2.2.7a
> 
> I have a weird SAMBA problem. On my XP Pro box against our Samba server 
> (been online and such for long time) from Office XP only when ever I save a 
> document it gets set as read only. Hence I only get one save for any given
> document. This is a new problem and is affecting only office XP. Other
> accounts other then mine do not have this problem.
> 
> I have tried adding in things like force create mask, force security, etc.
> No help at all.
> 
> This is a really new problem. The problem is there is I can not nail down 
> exactly when this started.
> 
> Also this problem is ONLY in MS Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint).
> 
> In Excel we get the error message: "The Document was saved succesfully, but 
> Excel cannot re-open it because of a sharing violation. Please Close 
> Document and try again." The Read-Only bit is now set on the file.
> 
> I have tried creating a new user and that user gets this problem too.
> 
> I have, in an attempt to solve this, installed ALL the MS Office patches, 
> problem persists.
> 
> If I login as a different user that was using office 2k first the problem
> does not exist.
> 
> We have not updated Samba nor office. This problem started strangely after
> we added the WINS definition....
> 
> Do not know if related. Can not find any references to this problem on the 
> net...naturally.
> 
> If someone can point me at some things to try I would be deeply grateful!!
> Cheers,
> Leeland