[Samba] Word and Excel files are read-only when opening

[John Drescher]

> Since we started our new Samba + LDAP backend server yesterday
> some (not all) PC we have a problem with Word and Excel files
> that are marked "read-only" when users are trying to open
> them from their Samba network shares.
>
> This happen ONLY for *.doc and *.xls files , if we open
> and save a *.html file with Word it works ...
>
> Any info/help greatly appreciated.
>
> Thank you
>

This probably is due to the fact that when Office saves a file it
creates a new file it creates a temp file then deletes the old file
then renames the temp file to the same name as the old file and in
this case the os magically sets the permissions of the renamed temp
file to what the old file had. The problem is that Linux does not have
this weird filesystem behavior built in so you have to emulate this
with samba. I believe some versons of samba required a create mask of
2777 to get this to work. BTW, this is discussed many times in the
archives.

John