Samba locking problem

[orobitai at ca.ibm.com]

hello all,
I have a problem that involves samba's locking mechanism, and from what I
could see I'm not the only one. I quoted this from a newsgroup because his
situation was very similar to my own.It involves using samba severs as
gateways to access the main file server.
Here goes:
BNFL BNFL <ap05 at dial.pipex.com> writes:


>I have an interesting problem with Samba, of which I'm trying to find a
solution to.
>I have tried to illustrate this with the following diagram :-
>
>  ----------------    ----------------            ----------------
----------------
>   |nt workstation 1|  |nt workstation 3|          |nt workstation 2|  |nt
workstation >4|
>    ----------------    ----------------            ----------------    >
----------------
>*connects        |                |                     |                |
*connects to
> to esu064         |              |                       |             |
esu070 in >the
> in the format       |            |                         |          |
format
>\\qsautocad\<share>   |           |                           |       |  >
\\qsautocad\<share>
>                     ---------------
---------------
>                    |samba gateway 1|                      |samba gateway
2|
>                    |     (esu064)  |                      |   (esu070)
|
>                     ---------------
---------------
>                             |                              |
>                              |  *NFS Connection           |   *NFS
Connection
>                               |  to esu092               |     to esu092
>                                |                        |
>                                 |                      |
>                               ---------------------------
>                              |    esu092 (file server)   |
>                               ---------------------------
>
>Here's the situation:
>
>If a client goes through the samba gateway 1 (esu064) and opens a file on
esu092,
>then a file lock is placed on that file and it prevents any other client
which goes
>through the samba gateway 1 (esu064) to open that file on esu092 until the
file lock
>has gone.  If an nt client then connects through the samba gateway 2
(esu070), that
>samba gateway is not aware of the lock that exists on the opened file on
esu092 (which
>was placed upon it by the first samba gateway).
>
>As a result of this, the same file which should have an active file lock
on it from the
>first samba gateway, can be opened by two nt clients at the same time!
(ie. nt >workstation1 and nt workstation 2).  This causes work to the file
to be lost (i.e. the >last of the 2 ntclients to work on the file gets the
file saved to their >modifications).  The first nt client to work on the
file, gets their work overwritten >by the second nt client.
>
>How can you therefore make both the samba servers (gateways 1 and 2) to
acknowledge the >file locks placed on esu092 by each other to prevent
multiple access of the same opened >file at the same time?


I'd also like to know which file (if any) keeps track of locked files as
they are modified by users.

Thanks guys
Oliver