[Samba] oplock_break and Excel data corruption with Samba 2.2.3a

[Federico Sevilla III]

Hi everyone,

Just today one of our users informed me that a file she was working on in
Microsoft Excel 97 got corrupted. She was working on the file directly on
our server, which is running Samba 2.2.3a compiled using gcc-3.0.4 on
Linux kernel 2.4.17-xfs and XFS-based filesystems.

I checked the Samba logs for her machine and found the following in a
search for the filename of the Excel file she was working on:

[2002/03/01 10:52:42, 0] smbd/oplock.c:oplock_break(758)
  oplock_break: receive_smb error (Success)
  oplock_break failed for file Gov't Agencies/PAG-IBIG/PAG-IBIG LOAN LEDGER.xls (dev = 80a, inode = 9379268, file_id = 1).
[2002/03/01 10:52:42, 0] smbd/oplock.c:oplock_break(843)
  oplock_break: client failure in break - shutting down this smbd.
[2002/03/01 10:52:42, 1] smbd/service.c:close_cnum(653)
  payroll (192.168.0.20) closed connection to service ap
[2002/03/01 10:52:42, 1] smbd/service.c:make_connection(615)
  payroll (192.168.0.20) connect to service ap as user milanie (uid=1047, gid=50) (pid 26341)

There were about 19 occurences of this series one after the other, until I
guess she hit that corruption (whatever actually caused it) and obviously
gave up.

I double-checked my smb.conf and there are no special lines to modify any
of the oplock settings. I double-checked the cable using a UTP cable
tester and it's all okay. The machine she was using was running Microsoft
Windows 95 with a 10Mbps NIC, a combination that's been stable so far.

Is there anything else I should check? I've heard she's not the only one
who ran into Excel data corruption problems lately, except the others
didn't report the incidents (grumble).

Is there anything I can do (even perhaps at the expense of performance) to
make things more robust? I'm afraid our data might be going down the drain
and I do not want that to happen. Yes, we have backups, but restoring
yesterday's data everyday isn't our view of productivity. ;>

I would appreciate any thoughts or follow-up questions on this.

Please be kind enough to cc me replies to this thread as I am not on the
Samba mailing list. I will continue to check the web archives, though.

Tanks a lot in advance.

 --> Jijo

--
Federico Sevilla III  :: jijo at leathercollection.ph
Network Administrator :: The Leather Collection, Inc.
GnuPG Key: http://jijo.leathercollection.ph/jijo.gpg