Samba Documentation

[Boyce, Nick]

Paul,

1)  Your symptom description came through to me as :

    This works sometimes,  but then I get 

     <<...OLE_Obj...>> 

I guess your "OLE_Obj" didn't make it through our firewall.  Please either
(a) attach it as a (small please !) graphic image file, or (b) just tell us
what the error message was in text.

2)  Doing what you say you want to - editing/saving MS Office files directly
onto a VMS network-mapped SMB drive from a Windows PC *application* - is
fraught with danger & difficulty.  Firstly, it seems that MS Office apps use
weird & undocumented SMB protocol packets to fiddle with their files when on
network drives (i.e. I think the implication is that they're network aware),
so much so that even Samba-for-Unix has trouble obeying all the possible MS
Office requests.  Secondly: Samba-for-VMS has problems of its own with the
way *some* Windows applications open/update/save files on network drives -
to do with the difference between "sequential stream" and "sequential
variable" files (I think), and to do with whether or not Samba can deduce
which type of file it should write, *and* set the right file type within the
VMS filesystem.

I think the upshot is that you probably shouldn't try doing what you say you
want - instead, use Excel to update the spreadsheet on a local Windows drive
- then simply *copy* the spreadsheet file to a Samba-for-VMS drive - this
works fine for everybody.

Disclaimer: I'm not a VMS sysadmin - just a lurking Unix one.  Hopefully
some of the VMS folks can help you better, or tell us where I'm wrong.

Nick Boyce
EDS Southwest Solution Centre, Bristol, UK



-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Wiles [mailto:paul.wiles at thomsonpublishingservices.co.uk]
Sent: 02 July 2003 15:31
To: 'samba-vms at lists.samba.org'
Subject: Samba Documentation


Can anyone tell me where to find configuration documentation for Samba for
Vms. I am running Samba 2.2.7a  on OPENVMS 7.2-1 and am trying to configure
samba so that some of our users can save excel spreadsheets from Windows NT
directly to our HP ES40 using drive mappings as below.

 [csv orders]
   comment = ops email directories on sy2
   valid users = GUEST
   path = /$1$dga14/itps/dat/csvorders
   browseable = yes
   public = yes
   writable = yes
   printable = no

This works sometimes,  but then I get 

 <<...OLE_Obj...>> 

[sig snipped]
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