About Samba and russian accounting software (1C)

[Baltep Ltd.]

Good morning (or some other time of day :-) ), dear Samba team members !

First: let me say "thank you" for your efforts to provide an alternative for
the world!

Second: Your product is especially welcome in Russia, where (except Moscow,
the capital city) cost of legal copy of W2K or other MS products sounds like
something unreal. But there are still some lawful citizens here, so Samba is
the right way for them.

Third: We've got a problem :-). I'll try to describe it... One of the most
popular accounting software in Russia is "1C:Enterprise" (where "C" means
russian symbol, so in english it should be 1S, but "1C" is a company logo,
so I'll use this spelling). CEO and owner of "1C" company is Mr. Nuraliev. I
think, he is extremely MS-oriented person. His company produces a whole
bunch of software, tightly integrated with MS products (with MSSQL, for
example). But most popular is non-SQL (file server) version of  1C:
Enterprise v.7.7 .  I'm (and many other sysadmins/analysts too) going to use
a Samba server as a file server for this product (I'm moving from old Novell
Netware server). Everything going fine with any file-server oriented
software... except for 1C. The problem is in corrupted .dbf files during
multiuser access to them. I think, the problem is in non-standard (or
MS-specific) locking of byte ranges beyond the end of files (maybe, with
huge offsets). In prior versions of Samba this problem can be cured wtih
"OLE locking compatibility" parameter set to "no". Sounds strange, but
working. But now this parameter is removed from Samba (I suppose, due to
internal modifications of locking code in sources). There are some reports
from sysadmins, that protocol = LANMAN1 helps, but I'm afraid, that it's not
a good idea (perfomance suffers). This problem seems to be hardware and
kernel version independent.

So, here is my questions:

- Do you have any idea about how to solve this problem ?
- Do you have any other requests from Russia about the same problem ?
- What can I do for you to help in solving of this problem ?

Thank you for your attention. And thanks again for such a nice product!

Sincerely yours,
Alim V. Baidjanov,
IT system analyst,
Baltep Ltd.
Russia, Kaliningrad city.