[Samba] Offline Files won't sync after Samba upgrade

[Mike Davison]

Dear Samba users,

Having scanned this list archive, this problem has been raised several 
times over the past 12 months on this list, but mostly without any 
response. Now it's happened to us too, and I raise it again in case 
anybody has figured it out in the meantime.

All our employees are provided with laptops, and spend a lot of time 
working offline. We make extensive use of the Offline Files capability 
of Win2K, synchronizing changes when back in the office, or over a VPN. 
This is our user-backup method, since it requires no effort from users 
and hence actually gets used. We've run like this for over 2 years 
without problems.

We have recently switched running Samba 2.2.7-security-fix-rollup on 
RedHat 8.  I'm not sure which Samba version that was - whatever shipped 
with RedHat 7.2 - but it didn't exhibit this problem.

With the new version, trying to synchronize any file modification made 
while offline, fails with the message "Offline Files (\\server\user on 
server): Access to 'file.txt' is denied on \\server\user\my_folder.

New files or modifications made while on-line sync OK. There is no 
problem accessing any file while online.
A new file, created offline, synchronizes OK, i.e. sync only fails when 
the file already exists on the server.
Oh, and it dumps an empty file for each failed sync with a name like 
"800BF4" (I presume it's Windows which makes this file).

Hence a tedious workaround is to rename the file when offline, 
synchronize (which causes the old copy to be deleted on the server, and 
creates the new one) and then rename the file back again when online.

I found two suggestions on this list which don't work:
Setting chmod 777 on files on the server makes no difference (and 
anyhow, wasn't necessary before).
Setting "force create mode = 0660" and "force directory mode = 0770" 
made no difference.

If anybody has had this problem and found out how to fix it, please let 
us know. Does anyone know if the problem is fixed in 3.0.* for example?