samba - Jan 2011 - Read-only alert for MS Office files on samba share

Hi everybody,

We've been running a samba server for some time, which is used both as PDC
and share space.
Recently, we bought some new machines which came with Windows 7 installed. I
struggled to find a solution to make them join the domain, and discovered I
had to upgrade samba for that, which I did.
We are now running version 3.4.9-42 on CentOS5.

Since this upgrade, we have problems with MS Office files that are opened
read-only because already open by "another user".
This happens very often on the Windows 7 machines, quite often on Vista
machines and I did not see it happen (yet at least) on XP machines.

We found a workaround to avoid the problem : instead of double clicking on
the shared file, if we right click on it and click on open, the problem does
not happen, which seems really strange !

When I try to open the file from the Windows machine and it complains the
file is "already in use by another user", I checked on the samba side
:
  - The file permissions are correct
  - There is no ~xxx file
  - The file is not open at all according to smbstatus
At the same time, if I try to open the file on a Windows XP machine, I have
no problem at all, whatever network user I use.

Could anybody help ?

Which version of Office?    Do you have full rights to the parent 
directory?  Maybe it creates temp files in a different location?     
When you double-click the file, was office already running?  I can't see 
why it would matter.

ALl I can think is that when you double-click a document different 
parameters are passed to the file system.   If I remember, in explorer 
when you associate file types with an app, you can also associate what 
the app should do with it.

Can you set office to always  create temp files on local drive rather 
than by default in the same directory as the file?


On 01/07/2011 03:52 AM, Admin machines wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> We've been running a samba server for some time, which is used both as
PDC
> and share space.
> Recently, we bought some new machines which came with Windows 7 installed.
I
> struggled to find a solution to make them join the domain, and discovered I
> had to upgrade samba for that, which I did.
> We are now running version 3.4.9-42 on CentOS5.
>
> Since this upgrade, we have problems with MS Office files that are opened
> read-only because already open by "another user".
> This happens very often on the Windows 7 machines, quite often on Vista
> machines and I did not see it happen (yet at least) on XP machines.
>
> We found a workaround to avoid the problem : instead of double clicking on
> the shared file, if we right click on it and click on open, the problem
does
> not happen, which seems really strange !
>
> When I try to open the file from the Windows machine and it complains the
> file is "already in use by another user", I checked on the samba
side :
>    - The file permissions are correct
>    - There is no ~xxx file
>    - The file is not open at all according to smbstatus
> At the same time, if I try to open the file on a Windows XP machine, I have
> no problem at all, whatever network user I use.
>
> Could anybody help ?
>