samba - Mar 1999 - File permissions/ownership lost?

Samba 2.0.0 on Solaris 2.5/sparc
14,000 users (samba released to small group, but intend to release to all)

My apologies if this is a FAQ:  point me in the right direction!

When editing a WORD document (or Excel, and probably others), the revised
file written back to the UNIX home directory loses its original ownership,
group-ownership and permissions (modes) and gets a default set (me, my
primary group, 644). 

For most people this might be OK (although 600 would be a preferable
default mode), but it wrecks any file-sharing that people might be doing
through groups.

1. Presumably the mode is system-wide, set by "create mask", and is
not
   settable per-user?

2. Can samba be persuaded to maintain the owner/group-owner of the
   original file?  Or is this a "feature" of the way WORD/Excel/etc
work
   (create new file, delete old, with no owner/mode retention)?

A workaround appears to be to use the "g+s" semantics on the UNIX
directory to force the group ownership of a new file to be inherited from
the directory rather than the user.  (Of course, the original owner and
modes are still lost, and this g+s forces group ownership onto everything,
not just selected items, in that directory.)

Any ideas, hints?  Or do we just have to try to live with it?

Supplementary question: Any ideas what other solutions, (e.g. TAS, Sun's
"Project Cascade" or Network Applicance Filers) do in this situation?

-- 

:  David Lee                                I.T. Service          :
:  Systems Programmer                       Computer Centre       :
:                                           University of Durham  :
:  Phone:    +44 191 374 2882 (ddi)         South Road            :
:  Fax:      +44 191 374 7759               Durham                :
:  Internet: T.D.Lee@durham.ac.uk           U.K.                  :

>  Can samba be persuaded to maintain the owner/group-owner of the
>  original file?  Or is this a "feature" of the way WORD/Excel/etc
work
>  (create new file, delete old, with no owner/mode retention)?
As mentioned in another reply, Word and Excel create new
files rather than overwrite the existing files, so Samba/Unix
correctly assign the new ownership to 'updated' files.

By using chmod g+s for the directory in conjunction with
force create mode, you can get reasonable control for
access to all files in a directory.

If it is of interest, we have a set of mods which we make
to Samba for our clients which allows us to set up certain
smb.conf settings (force create mode, admin user, and
a few others) per directory including newly created
directorie, rather than per share as in standard samba.

Once set up, samba looks after itself without extra admin
for most business use, and the users access all their
documents, public, workgroup or private, through a single
share with the appropriate security supplied by Unix and
maintained by Samba.

These mods have the potential to also maintain the same
file ownership for word docos etc, but I haven't needed to
do it.

BTW, the g+s setting for a directory trick breaks with
Samba (with Unix really) when a file with a different group
ownership is moved into the directory.  The moved file
retains its group ownership.  I keep meaning to add a
mod for this, but in practice our clients have not hit that
problem.

David Bullock
Loftus Computing Services
Adelaide, South Australia