[Samba] Resources forks 'dot underscore' files locked indefinitely from MacOSX clients

smb at asdfghjkl.org smb at asdfghjkl.org
Tue Apr 6 17:35:17 GMT 2004


We have a central samba file share for our designers (who all use OSX
boxes, and mostly use Macromedia products) to work off of.  I've lately
been able to track down a lot of application quirks (mostly problems with
errors when saving, about files being locked) to the Mac resource fork
files being indefinitely locked.  Here's a sample from a `smbstatus`

14853  DENY_NONE  0x1         RDONLY     NONE            
/files/HCMG/mainline/proto1/images/._neckpain.jpg   Tue Apr  6 10:41:22
2004
14853  DENY_NONE  0x1         RDONLY     NONE            
/files/HCMG/mainline/proto1/images/._golfers.jpg   Tue Apr  6 10:41:18
2004
14853  DENY_NONE  0x1         RDONLY     NONE            
/files/HCMG/mainline/proto1/._index.php   Tue Apr  6 11:03:38 2004
14853  DENY_NONE  0x1         RDONLY     NONE            
/files/HCMG/mainline/proto1/forms/._shoulderrepair.pdf   Tue Apr  6
11:03:38 2004
14853  DENY_NONE  0x1         RDONLY     NONE            
/files/HCMG/mainline/proto1/images/._spine.jpg   Tue Apr  6 10:41:22 2004
14853  DENY_NONE  0x1         RDONLY     NONE            
/files/HCMG/mainline/proto1/images/._hip.jpg   Tue Apr  6 10:41:18 2004
14853  DENY_NONE  0x1         RDONLY     NONE            
/files/HCMG/mainline/proto1/images/._box.gif   Tue Apr  6 10:41:18 2004
14853  DENY_NONE  0x1         RDONLY     NONE            
/files/HCMG/mainline/proto1/images/._hand.jpg   Tue Apr  6 10:41:18 2004
14853  DENY_NONE  0x1         RDONLY     NONE            
/files/HCMG/mainline/proto1/images/._bgimage.gif   Tue Apr  6 10:41:18
2004
(the entries here aren't populated with really ancient data due to a
recent server restart)

These files stay locked long after any application dealing with them has
been quit, excluding the finder.  I've noticed on casual smbstatus's
seeing locked files that have not been accessed in over a week.

Although the problem seems to mostly occur with Macromedia's Studio
products, it is not limited to that application suite. The permanent locks
are also created with MS Word, Acrobat, BBEdit, and many other
applications; they still manage to save properly, with occasionally
displaying a warning message about a file being locked.  It just seems
that Macromedia products aren't horribly fault tolerant and just prefer to
error and delete the working file (which I chock up to bad programming). 
Added note: Macromedia has been contacted about this problem as well, but
their developers were not able to reproduce the problem.


The main question:
Does anyone know why MacOSX creates these permanent locks on the resource
forks, and is it preventable? (short of disabling locking in samba or
setting up a 'veto files', both of which just skirt around the actual
problem)


The computers involved in this senario are:
Server, running Debian-woody, with samba 2.2.8a compiled from source
Clients, running MacOSX 10.3.3 and below (to 10.2, but we noticed problems
even earlier)

Thanks
-- Gabe Martin-Dempesy


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