[Samba] Oplock problems with Office 97 and Windows 95 in Samba > 2.0.7

[Hannu Virtanen]

Hello,

We have used Samba in SGI IRIX 6.5(now 6.5.11m) machines from the SGI
version 2.0.7. We have Windows 95, NT4 and 2000 clients. We had no problems
with the version 2.0.7 at all. I am looking for the new possibilities(PDC,
BDC and LDAP...) with Samba 2.2.5 and newer. I installed samba.org version
of Samba 2.2.5 and from that we have had problems with Office 97 documents
in Windows 95 machines. Office freezes and cannot save or create new
documents or open existing documents. I searched for this kind of problems
from the mailing lists and the web and found out that i am not the only one
having problems with oplocks.
Why did i not have problems with 2.0.7, is Windows 95 support forgotten from
the 2.2.x versions of Samba?
The common advice is to put oplocks = no, but this i cannot do, because it
means not to use Office 97 from Windows 95 machines(they cannot use any
Office documents from the share or create new ones at all), why is that?
Is there difference in putting oplocks =no at global or share sections on
smb.conf, which kind?
Is there a way of telling the client to not ask for oplocks, so that i could
disable oplocks from Windows 95 machines?
We are now using Samba 2.2.6 with the same problems as 2.2.5 even though
there have been discussions of correcting locking problems from 2.2.5, but
if this thing was fine allready in version 2.0.7, why does Samba have this
kind of fundamental problems?
Version 2.2.5 and 2.2.6 have oplock errors also with other programs(F-Secure
Anti-Virus, AutoCAD LT 97...), but they does not seem to affect to programs
like Office 97.
There has been also loss of documents with Office 97 at these situations,
when the program cannot save the file(anywhere anymore).
I have not heard any problems with Windows NT4 or 2000 clients allthough in
the web many have told there ar same kind of problems also with these
clients.


Hannu Virtanen