[Samba] Samba3.0.2a, MS Office (Excel), Save problem.

[Jonas Olsson]

On Mon, 1 Mar 2004 System_Administrator at koppersarch.co.nz wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've done a brief search of the list archieves and cannot find any
> solutions to this problem, so I'll post my story and hopefuly someone will
> have a better answer.
>
> Brief Description:
> This problem has now occured with a number of users, running different
> versions of Office (see below).
> When saving documents, Office seems to set the read-only bit. The problem
> is best shown with Excel, which when saving a spredsheet, reports the
> following error:
> "The Document was saved succesfully, but Excel cannot re-open it because
> of a sharing violation. Please Close the Document and try again."
>
> More details:
> I use Excel in all my examples here, since I personally have only been
> able to get the bug to occur when using Excel, but others have reported it
> occuring in Word aswell.
> When opening the document in Excel, the permissions are fine, however when
> saving, for some reason excel sets the read-only bit, which gets
> translated in linux permissions to -r--rw-rw-.
> We are using extended ACLs, and Office always seems to muck arround with
> those bits anyhow.

[ - snip - section with extra info ]

> The only thing I can think of thats worth noting in the above splattering
> of info is the acl on abc_sales.xls, the group:113:rwx, there is NO gid
> 113. A search of the LDAP directory AND of /etc/passwd reveals no gid 113,
> and noone belonging to any gid 113. (maybe a clue?). (oh, and no, that acl
> line wasn't there before Excel came along and screwed it).
>
> Products:
> The problem appears in Office 97, Office 2002, Office XP, and Office 2003.

[ - snip - some more info ]

> Why is it happening?


In my deployment of Samba 3.0.2a to two production environments I came
across this problem. I am not using ACLs in the underlying filesystem
(ext3fs) on our Linux servers but files saved by Excel and Word (Office
XP/2003) were getting Unix modes of 0444 (only the read flag set).

In my case I was able to boil the problem down to the following
combination of options:

profile acls = yes
nt acl support = yes

If both of these are set for a share (nt acl support is enabled for all
shares by default), Excel and Word will reset the file permissions to
read-only for files saved. I suspect this has to do with Office
applications trying to change the ACLs on files they manipulate.

Regards,

  /Jonas Olsson