[Samba] SUMMARY: Can't 'save-as' from MS Word

Gene Huft Gene.Huft at ci.seattle.wa.us
Tue Nov 19 00:25:01 GMT 2002


Thanks a million to Wendell Wilson, who offered a solution
to the problem we've been seeing regarding saving a document in MS Word.
I know we really do need to upgrade to at least 2.2.6, and I am planning
it - 
but this gives us little more breathing room with everything else going
on.

Once again, appreciate your help!

--Gene

Original Question:
At 04:35 PM 11/14/2002 -0800, I wrote:
>Samba Gurus,
>I've got a Solaris box running samba 2.0.7.  A couple of users on
Windows 
>XP clients are reporting problems saving files from within MS Word, and

>Wordpad to the samba share, which of course is a mapped drive. They get
an 
>error saying "This is not a valid file name"....  These XP boxes do
have 
>the reg hacks plainpassword.reg and signorseal.reg installed.   The
work 
>around is to save a file to a local directory and then copy the file
over 
>to the samba drive via windows explorer, but that s*cks!
>
>Any ideas?  this is driving us bananas!

Wendell's reply

----------------------------------------------------------
Gene.Huft at Seattle.Gov
Unix Systems 
SPU Information Technology
City of Seattle
206.233.7833
:
>>> Wendell Wilson <wendell at qx.net> 11/14/02 08:17PM >>>
I have had loads of problems like this. Let me help you out, so you can 
avoid the heartache and misery I went through.
Are you setting up shares to be "shared" among several users?
For some reason word loves to change file permissions.. I am using both 
2.2.6 and 3.0alpha20. You really should upgrade, first
off, but the way I fixed it is also present in samba 2.0, I believe.

In the share definition, I used something like

force user = %U
force group = somegroup
create mode = 0660
directory mode = 770
write list @unixgroup

Word was setting permissions like -rw------- on all the files it
interacted 
with.. and primary UID on unix maps to a user only (not a user or group 
like in NT where it is a more generic primary owner ID)
For global (well, group wide) shares of people dumping their MS word
docs 
for others, I used the following

force user = administrator
force group = accounting
create mask = 0660
directory mask = 770

the "force security mode" parameter may also help you. Look up the
smb.conf 
documentation for that version of samba.

Apparently, word's file operation routines are different than windows 
itself, which is why explorer works. Explorer (somewhat stupidly) tries 
before checking the file information out, expecting the server to return

the error. This problem gets a lot more complicated, fast, if you want
to 
use Access. There are magical settings I've discovered to make it all
work, 
though.

I'd be happy to provide more help if you can give me more info, or if
this 
didn't work at all for you.

Wendell
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