samba - Mar 2004 - Samba3.0.2a, MS Office (Excel), Save problem.

Hi all,

I've done a brief search of the list archieves and cannot find any 
solutions to this problem, so I'll post my story and hopefuly someone will 
have a better answer.

Brief Description:
This problem has now occured with a number of users, running different 
versions of Office (see below).
When saving documents, Office seems to set the read-only bit. The problem 
is best shown with Excel, which when saving a spredsheet, reports the 
following error:
"The Document was saved succesfully, but Excel cannot re-open it because 
of a sharing violation. Please Close the Document and try again."

More details:
I use Excel in all my examples here, since I personally have only been 
able to get the bug to occur when using Excel, but others have reported it 
occuring in Word aswell.
When opening the document in Excel, the permissions are fine, however when 
saving, for some reason excel sets the read-only bit, which gets 
translated in linux permissions to -r--rw-rw-. 
We are using extended ACLs, and Office always seems to muck arround with 
those bits anyhow.



Here is an ls and getfacl of a directory and file that has been opened and 
saved with Excel. (usernames/filenames changed for security reasons).

$ ls -l /home/users/bob/test/
total 2396
-r--rwx---+   1 bob root      1188352 Mar  1 12:02 abc_sales.xls
-rw-rwx---+   1 bob root      1188352 Mar  1 12:33 xyz_sales.xls
-r--rwx---+   1 bob root        13824 Mar  1 12:27 booktest.xls
-rwxrwx---+   1 bob root        19968 Mar  1 12:27 
sadfasdfasdfasdfasdf.doc

$ getfacl /home/users/bob/test/
# file: home/users/bob/test
# owner: bob
# group: root
user::rwx
user:bob:rwx
group::rwx
group:domadm:rwx
mask::rwx
other::---
default:user::rwx
default:user:bob:rwx
default:group::r-x
default:group:domadm:rwx
default:mask::rwx
default:other::r-x

$ getfacl /home/users/bob/test/abc_sales.xls
# file: home/users/bob/test/abc_sales.xls
# owner: bob
# group: root
user::r--
group::rw-
group:113:rwx
group:domadm:rwx
mask::rwx
other::---

$ getfacl /home/users/bob/test/xyz_sales.xls
# file: home/users/bob/test/xyz_sales.xls
# owner: bob
# group: root
user::rw-
user:bob:rwx
group::rw-
group:domadm:rwx
mask::rwx
other::---

The only thing I can think of thats worth noting in the above splattering 
of info is the acl on abc_sales.xls, the group:113:rwx, there is NO gid 
113. A search of the LDAP directory AND of /etc/passwd reveals no gid 113, 
and noone belonging to any gid 113. (maybe a clue?). (oh, and no, that acl 
line wasn't there before Excel came along and screwed it).

Products:
The problem appears in Office 97, Office 2002, Office XP, and Office 2003. 

Though I believe the error message in Office 97 is different.
The problem *may* be limited to Windows 2000 and above. As in, I've seen 
it happen on 2k and above, but not on 98.
I've been running the Samba 3 pre-release and 3.0.2a samba versions and 
the problem has occured on both of them.

What I've tried:
Upgrading Samba (to 3.0.2a).
Setting "force user mode" to 0600
Finally I tried setting "inhert acls = no" and "nt acl support =
no". This
SEEMS to have fixed it (at the cost of essentially disabling ACLs).

Why is it happening?
I don't know. 
Because this is a production enviornment, I haven't been able to recompile 
w/ debugging, nor have I had the time to look through detailed log files.

Samba Info:
Version: 3.0.2a, (precompiled Debian binary). (Also occured on custom 3 
prerelease version compiled from source).
Features in use: Extended ACLs, LDAP backend (storing all samba/linux user 
accounts, machine accounts, groups, etc).
OS: Debian Woody. (running custom 2.4.21 kernel).
Noteworthy things: I have not set anything to do with locking in the 
smb.conf file. All defaults regarding locking and oplocks are in place).

Hopefully either this is a simple problem with a simple solution, or this 
helps anyone with the same problem as me, and hopefully a developer will 
spend the time to figure out the problem.

Any other questions, let me know,

Nick
(btw - I'm away till Friday, so any replies will be delayed by that long).

Dear Nick,

I had the same problem and it works for me with 'security = 770' setting
in
the share (using 3.0.2a as well). So ACLs usable, as far as I can understand
'force * mode' doesn't work (w/ ACL?).

Hope it helps,
Ralf

-- 
Name:             Ralf Tomczak
Firma:            scitech it solutions GmbH
Adresse:          Neuendorfstra?e 18 a
                  16761  Hennigsdorf
                  Deutschland

Gesch?ftlich:     +49 (03302) 559505
Mobiltelefon:     +49 (0173) 6040312
Fax gesch?ftl.:   +49 (03302) 559320
E-Mail:           r.tomczak@scitech-gmbh.de
Webseite:         http://www.scitech-gmbh.de

Hello!

<quote>
Brief Description:
This problem has now occured with a number of users, running different
versions of Office (see below).
When saving documents, Office seems to set the read-only bit. The problem
is best shown with Excel, which when saving a spredsheet, reports the
following error:
"The Document was saved succesfully, but Excel cannot re-open it because
of a sharing violation. Please Close the Document and try again."

</quote>

We have the same problem! On 2.2.8a...
Unfortunatley, we can't reproduce it :-(
As I readed on news group, some people have the same problem on windows
fileservers.
May be this is Excel problem?
After all we used dos filemode to allow not owners change read-only bit....

Hi!

 I had the same problem with wxp_sp1+officexp, but it went away after
patching with hotfixes. Check for DENY_WRITE or so from smbstatus -L. These
patches will be included in the next xp service pack to be released on the
first half of 2004.

 http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;814112

--
Pirkka


 Dmitry Melekhov wrote:
> Hello!
>
> <quote>
> Brief Description:
> This problem has now occured with a number of users, running
> different versions of Office (see below).
> When saving documents, Office seems to set the read-only bit. The
> problem is best shown with Excel, which when saving a spredsheet,
> reports the following error:
> "The Document was saved succesfully, but Excel cannot re-open it
> because of a sharing violation. Please Close the Document and try
> again."
>
> </quote>
>
> We have the same problem! On 2.2.8a...
> Unfortunatley, we can't reproduce it :-(
> As I readed on news group, some people have the same problem on
> windows fileservers.
> May be this is Excel problem?
> After all we used dos filemode to allow not owners change read-only
> bit....

<quote>
 My problem was really with XFS and Excel files in shared
mode.  Back to the previous example, after Tom saves the file,
Tom becomes the owner of the file and Bob ends up in the ACL list.
John comes along and saves the file.  John becomes the owner and
now Tom and Bob are now on the ACL list.

 XFS had a (random?) bug where the ACL list gets reset when
you reach around 20 or so ACL entries.  If this bug occurs when
John saves the file, Tom and Bob's ACL entries get deleted along with
the other entries.

 XFS was eventually replaced on my server with ReiserFS.

</quote>

Hello!

I can't beleive this, sorry. ;-)
I run Linux servers with xfs at least 3 years.
Samba _never_ adds users to acls, and even don't change owner!
Yes, Excel files are with new owner, but just because Excel creates new file
instead of saving over.

About reiserfs. AFAIK, many people run it without problems.
But, imho, it is unstable. IMHO.
So, good luck ! :-)

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004 System_Administrator@koppersarch.co.nz wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I've done a brief search of the list archieves and cannot find any
> solutions to this problem, so I'll post my story and hopefuly someone
will
> have a better answer.
>
> Brief Description:
> This problem has now occured with a number of users, running different
> versions of Office (see below).
> When saving documents, Office seems to set the read-only bit. The problem
> is best shown with Excel, which when saving a spredsheet, reports the
> following error:
> "The Document was saved succesfully, but Excel cannot re-open it
because
> of a sharing violation. Please Close the Document and try again."
>
> More details:
> I use Excel in all my examples here, since I personally have only been
> able to get the bug to occur when using Excel, but others have reported it
> occuring in Word aswell.
> When opening the document in Excel, the permissions are fine, however when
> saving, for some reason excel sets the read-only bit, which gets
> translated in linux permissions to -r--rw-rw-.
> We are using extended ACLs, and Office always seems to muck arround with
> those bits anyhow.
[ - snip - section with extra info ]
> The only thing I can think of thats worth noting in the above splattering
> of info is the acl on abc_sales.xls, the group:113:rwx, there is NO gid
> 113. A search of the LDAP directory AND of /etc/passwd reveals no gid 113,
> and noone belonging to any gid 113. (maybe a clue?). (oh, and no, that acl
> line wasn't there before Excel came along and screwed it).
>
> Products:
> The problem appears in Office 97, Office 2002, Office XP, and Office 2003.
[ - snip - some more info ]
> Why is it happening?

In my deployment of Samba 3.0.2a to two production environments I came
across this problem. I am not using ACLs in the underlying filesystem
(ext3fs) on our Linux servers but files saved by Excel and Word (Office
XP/2003) were getting Unix modes of 0444 (only the read flag set).

In my case I was able to boil the problem down to the following
combination of options:

profile acls = yes
nt acl support = yes

If both of these are set for a share (nt acl support is enabled for all
shares by default), Excel and Word will reset the file permissions to
read-only for files saved. I suspect this has to do with Office
applications trying to change the ACLs on files they manipulate.

Regards,

  /Jonas Olsson