samba - Mar 2004 - Problem with Office (and Windows 2000) and oplocks (and even without)

Since switching from Samba 2.2.3a-6 on Debian stable to 3.0.2a packages from 
the samba.org server (system is Debian stable too) we've had extreme
problems
with Office documents. Samba acts as a PDC and the user log onto it. The LDAP 
Authentication works great. Our clients are all Windows 2000 and Office 2000.

When opening documents word (excel) sometimes just hangs (for 30 seconds until 
on the server I get at timeout message for an oplock break request) No user 
ever has the patience to wait that long to see that it does work after the 
timeout but those timeouts really interrupt workflow. Also sometimes when the 
documents do open we get pages full of weird characters where the original 
document only had one page. After closing and reopening (if that works at 
all) these changes are mostly gone.
>From the global section of my smb.conf:
   oplocks = yes
   level2 oplocks = yes
   kernel oplocks = no
   oplock break wait time = 70


The oplock break wait time was set to 10 for some time now without any effect. 
With kernel oplocks = yes it didn't work either (which is why I tried with
no
after all). I don't know yet if the longer (70) break wait time will work 
(someone suggested it on this list or a usenet group). All oplock related 
settings were set to default on the old server.
>From the following log message I guess that the clients are also misbehaving
but all Knowledge Base articles I found at microsoft speak of either NT4 or 
Windows XP. Very helpful indeed.

[2004/03/12 15:34:07, 0, pid=10726] smbd/oplock.c:oplock_break(879)
  oplock_break: client failure in oplock break in file ...

I also tried to disable oplocks completely (oplocks = no) but that does not 
work either. When I do that the clients get errors about locked files, 
opening nearly all documents in read only mode. I suspected some virus 
scanner or the windows explorer locking files but even without the virus 
scanner enabled I get those errors.

Disabling oplocks on the Windows 2000 clients also exhibited the problem of 
locked files which only open read only.

I've searched google (groups) now for the last three days without _any_
useful
tips. I could live with a performance drop that oplocks = no would bring, if 
the files wouldn't be locked completely then.

I hope someone has any hints on how to solve the problem. The users are really 
getting mad.


Alex

Solved I think :) Anyway, just wanted to give other people with the same 
problem something to find in google, as I myself could not find anything.

On Friday 12 March 2004 16:18, Alexander Gretencord
wrote:
> When opening documents word (excel) sometimes just hangs (for 30 seconds
> until on the server I get at timeout message for an oplock break request)
I changed that to 8 seconds in the source, recompiled and tried again. No 
chance. In the log file I got an 8 second timeout but word/excel still hung 
for 30 seconds and more.

Also not all types of documents exhibited the problem. With normal word 
documents I was not really able to reproduce the problem but as soon as you 
imported data from an excel sheet into the word document for making a form 
letter (I think it's called form letter in english versions :)) we started 
getting the hangs.

As noted in my original post, nothing oplock related really worked. However if 
you set blocking locks = no the problem seemed to go away. We were not able 
to reproduce the problem and the users have not got any timeouts today 
either.


Alex