samba - Jun 2004 - File locking from Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther)

Dear list,

	My system administrator at office runs a SMB server for us all to
share files at smb://server/share/ , on which we share mainly MS
Office/OpenOffice.org documents. I have recently switched to iBook G4 with
Panther. After the switching, I can connect to the SMB server using
Panther's built in SMB capability (under Finder). But then we discover
that when I open a file on smb://server/share, I am unable to lock that
file so that other users can still open the same document read-write and
save something to that document. This creates a dangerous situation for
our file sharing system on SMB. (But if other users open some document on
share, I can only open it from my iBook in read-only mode: their lock is
still ok.)

	For your information, I am now using OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 to open
those files on share. Other users at my office use MS Windows XP and
OpenOffice.org 1.1.

	So, is this a problem of my iBook/OpenOffice.org or a problem of
the SMB server? Either way, how can we solve this to make my access to the
files on share create proper file locks?

	Yours,

P. K.

> My guess would be that it's a bug in the finder implimentation of
> SMB.  Try installing the samba utilities on your ibook (they're
> probably already there) and then mounting the filesystem (as opposed
> to just browsing the network).  I'd bet locking works then.  Then>
you
can just mount/unmount the volume when you need to use it.

        I have tried this:

sudo mount_smbfs //username@server/share /mnt/

        It's the same as mounting it using Finder (ie unable to lock the
opend file).

        Yours,

P. K.