[Samba] 3.0.9 homes share and read-only MS Excel files

[Michael Wynne]

Hello,

I'm hoping that somebody out there can help with this strange problem...

First off I'm running Kernel 2.6.9, Samba 3.0.9 on Debian Linux, with WinXP clients.

Users working out of their home directories are creating and saving Excel documents and when they later attempt to edit and save the document they've created it results in this message from Excel 2000:

"Document saved successfully. Cannot reopen the saved document due to low memory. Please close the document."

Upon inspection of the unix file modes I find the files are being set to read-only (444). The users are able to modify the read-only status of the file from their XP clients (i.e. uncheck the read-only attribute in the properties dialog), but of course this is annoying to continuously repeat. 

After some experimenting I've found that disabling nt acl support seems to eliminate this problem, though it creates other problems not to have acls enabled. I've tried setting "force create mode" to 0755 as a workaround without success. It's also interesting that this does not seem to affect any other file shares on the server.

My smb.conf homes share entry looks like this:

[homes]
  comment = User home directories (/storage2/homes)
  csc policy = programs
  strict locking = yes
  read only = no
  browsable = yes
  hide dot files = yes
  force create mode = 0755
  force directory mode = 2755

Any help with this will be greatly appreciated!!

-- 
Michael Wynne