Samba/MS Access Files

David Rankin drankin at txucom.net
Sun Feb 4 03:08:08 GMT 2001


Doug, here is a though that plays off Chris's response.  I haven't moved my
access database over to my samba server, but I have had similar problems with
other office products.  The solution I found to enable multiple users to access
datafiles created  by other users was to use "force create mode" as Chris and
you had done and also "force user = [your group]" where your users are a member
of [your group].  What I found was that when an individual creates  an MS
Office datafile, the ownership on the linux side is set to the user that
created the file (as is expected).  All subsequent users open the file as
read-only regardless of the "force create mode" permissions (unexpected - I
still don't know why that is so)

To eliminate shared documents being only modifiable by the original user, I
force all users of the shared files to be [my group = or whatever group each
user is a member of]. This eliminated the weird read-only access problem I was
having.

For your specific problem, if the MS Access .ldb file is being created by an
individual user and ownership is assigned to that user, any subsequent users
could be experiencing the read-only problem due to the ownership issue
described above and triggering a "to many users error".

Doug Jolley wrote:

> >We've had just this problem, and our solution was to use:
>
> >force create mode = 666
>
> >in the share definition where you keep your database. This means that when
> >Access creates a lock file (.ldb), which it does as a specific user, it
> >creates it with mode 0666 which means that any other user can modify it,
> >which is what you need for multiple concurrent use of an Access database.
> >The first user creates the lock file if it doesn't exist, and all
> >subsequent users modify it to announce their presence.
>
> Hi, Chiris.  Thanks for the very interesting response.  The reason
> I say that is that I already have "force create mode = 666" set.
> Before I did that, the error message I was getting on the workstations
> was to the effect that a lock file couldn't be created.  I reasoned
> that that was because the lock file had already been created (as a
> result of the presence of the first user) and was not writable by the
> additional user.  So, that's when I implemented the
> "force create mode = 666".  Thereafter I no longer got error
> messages relating to inability to create a lock file; but instead,
> I started getting these error messages about too many users.
>
> What a mess!
>
> Thanks for the input.
>
>      ... doug
> _____________________________________________________________________
> Doug Jolley     mailto://doug@footech.com      http://www.footech.com
>          Don't bogart that file, my friend.  Net it over to me.
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------





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