[Samba] OpLock+flat DB corruption (Was: How Samba let us down )

[John H Terpstra]

On Thu, 24 Oct 2002, David Brodbeck wrote:

>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Chris de Vidal [mailto:cdevidal at yahoo.com]
>
> > --- "Bradley W. Langhorst" <brad at langhorst.com> wrote:
> > > the oplock problem with access databases is well
> > > known...
> > > I don't think samba alone can fix it.
> > > (somebody prove me wrong :)
> >
> > Samba alone probably cannot fix it.  I have since
> > learned it can also be a problem on NT.  Jeremy says,
> > "file corruption is a drop everything - priority 1
> > bug," so...
>
> We've seen file corruption at our site under both NT and Samba, but in our
> case it was actually less common with Samba.  Eventually we gave up on flat
> Access mdb files and went with MySQL and linked tables -- this seems to be
> the only real solution.  Access is kind of a toy database by itself, it
> works just long enough to get you hooked and then it fails when you get more
> than a few users involved.

I had a customer who ran an Access MDB for years with only 5 users. No
problems. Then he brought a second office on line. Next day - bang!
Datafile munched up (NT4 server!). We migrated to Postgresql - not one
problem since. BTW: Using the 32bit ODBC driver for MS Windows, still
using the same MS Access application. I do not like MDB files - at all.

My $0.02 worth.

- John T.

-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org