Autocad vs. Samba

[Tim.Brennan at coat.com]

I've got a really weird situation happening....

We recently upgraded our AutoCAD users to Release 14 (cause they HAD
to have it.... It is SOOO much better than what they had (R13 running
on Sun stations)).

They are running R14 on individual 233 Pentium pc's.  The application
is plenty fast.  They all share a common network drive for their work
files.  This is provided by Samba, running on a Sun sparc5, solaris 2.5.
Occasionally, they are getting errors when they try to open a file.  It's
prompting them to open the file read only, as if they didn't have permissions
for the file, or someone else had it locked already.  Permissions are
correct (it even happens when the owner of the file tries to open it).
They could go from opening a file, editing it, closing it, open a new
file, close it, and go back to opening file 1, and getting the permission
message.  Sometimes they can try several times, and eventually Autocad
will allow them to open the file.  Sometimes not.

Autodesk told my users that this is a known problem between AutoCAD and
Samba, and to try another NFS product, or switch to local files.  

I could add enough disk to one of the pc's, and let them share them
amongst themselves, but I like being able to back the files up to tape
at a regular interval, as well as providing the files from a pair of
highly available servers (sparc 1000's) gives me a little more data
integrity.  Also, Samba works perfectly well with lots of other applications.

Any one else run in to similar problems (and find a resolution)?

Thanks.

				Tim

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
				 Timothy Brennan
      .---.        .-----------  System Administration
     /     \  __  /    ------    Tim.Brennan at coat.com
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