[Samba] Re: Samba and Excel corruption

[Federico Sevilla III]

Scott,
(cc Samba list)

Quoting Scott Merrill <skippy at skippy.net>:
> Federico,
> I read with great interest your post to the Samba mailing list about Excel
> files corrupting on a Samba share.
> (http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/samba/2002-March/068091.html)
> 
> I ran into a very similar situation, and came across your post while
> scanning the mailing list archives looking for answers.
> 
> My particular situation is a little more bizarre:
> A user opens an Excel file (we're using Office 2000 on Win98SE).
> Click "File", and select "Save As".
> Save the file as itself.
> 
> A dialog pops up announcing that the file was saved, but the workstation is
> low on memory.
> 
> Any attempt to open the recently saved file causes Excel to complain that
> the data is not in a recognized format.

Oh my. This doesn't sound good at all. Is this reproducible? Anything in the
logs? My problems weren't as predictably reproducible, although it happened
often. Perhaps the lack of user feedback was also a major factor in my inability
to test the problem further than I was able to.

> I'm currently running Samba 2.2.2 on an SGI Octane running IRIX 6.5.14m
> with an XFS filesystem.

Currently we're using Samba 2.2.3a, using the samba-2.2.3a-6 Debian packages on
Linux with kernel 2.4.18-xfs and an XFS filesystem.

> I'm intensely curious whether the "oplocks = no" and "nt acl support = no"
> options have corrected your symptoms?

"nt acl support = no" didn't seem to have much effect, but I left it in anyway
since I don't need that feature. "oplocks = no" seems to have been the effective
cure. We haven't had data corruption, since. Speed hasn't decreased
significantly -- or at least not significant enough to be humanly noticed.
Perhaps this is because the load is nowhere near enough to bring the server down
to its knees even if everyone accessed all sorts of files heavily at the same
time. But of course this has never happened so I'm going out on a limb here.
It's my long way of saying "so far so good, but YMMV". :)

 --> Jijo

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Federico Sevilla III   :  <http://jijo.free.net.ph/>
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