[Samba] Problems saving Excel sheets using Office 97 on a Sambashare

[Brandon Laing]

Nathan,

Thanks for the tips. Most of these settings were already in place, but the ones that were not already there I set up, with the exception of the 'force group' setting. I hesitate to try this simply because many of the subfolders under the shared volume are have their access controlled by group, and I didn't want to risk preventing others from accessing their files in the middle of the day. I'm not sure it would change much though, as this doesn't exactly seem to be a permisions issue, at least not a normal one. Each folder is set with a group, and the GID is set also so it stays. Each user in the group then has full access to all folders and files in that folder.... except for Excel files. These users can create new files and folders, delete them, and do anything they need, but if they try to save a file that they are not the owner of, they see the error in Excel when they try to save. 

Could it be that we're using such an old version of Excel? Would a newer version possibly save it's files differently?

Thanks!
Brandon


>>> "Nathan Vidican" 03/03/05 03:49PM >>>
Try something like the following:

[some-share]
  path = /some/where/files/are
  valid users = @groupname
  write list = @groupname
  create mask = 0660
  directory mask = 0770
  force group = groupname

<end of snippet>

We utilize similar configurations; by forcing the group, it will be
irrelevent as to which logon group a particular user belongs to, and still
it will create/save files with the permissions as expressed (group
read/write/[execute for dir]). Thereby allowing all members of 'groupname'
to access any file put in the share by any other user in the same group.


--
Nathan Vidican
nvidican at wmptl.com 
Windsor Match Plate & Tool Ltd.
http://www.wmplt.com/ 

-----Original Message-----
From: samba-bounces+nvidican=wmptl.com at lists.samba.org 
[mailto:samba-bounces+nvidican=wmptl.com at lists.samba.org] On Behalf Of
Brandon Laing
Sent: Thursday, March 03, 2005 3:48 PM
To: samba at lists.samba.org 
Subject: [Samba] Problems saving Excel sheets using Office 97 on a
Sambashare


Hey all,

We're having some trouble saving Excel documents on our Samba Fileserver. We
are moving people over to our Samba box, and have moved most of our
documents over.
Now, we have people opening their Excel documents, but are unable to save
them. When something is saved, we see this message:

Your changes could not be saved to 'document.xls', but were saved to a
temporary document named '349rgjh928'. Close the existing document, then
open the temporary
document and save it under a new name.

Now, these users have full access to the folder in which they're trying to
save these sheets. New documents can be created an deleted without any
problem, so it doesn't
appear to be a permissions problem. However, if I manually set the document
owner to the user trying to save the document, it seems to save without a
problem. Of course,
this isn't a viable option, as we have multiple people accessing these
documents all the time, and as a group, they have full access to these
folders.

So, I'm wondering what I can do on this system to resolve this issue. I know
we're using an old version of Excel, but it still works for what we need.
Our version of Samba is
3.0.10-1.fc2, and we are running on a Fedora Core 2 system. The clients
connecting are using Windows XP Home, and have Excel 97 SR-2.

Any ideas on what I can do to clear this up? I can post config files if
needed, but as of right now, it's almost the default with just the share
volume set up.

Thanks,
Brandon

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