[Samba] Office products Locking issues

[Michael Heydon]

>
> In the past months I had similar locking problems: outlook running on 
> a client PC, outlook.pst file stored on a (private) network share. The 
> client PC would sometimes hang, and the user would then reboot the PC.
> After the reboot, Outlook complained that the outlook.pst file could 
> not be opened because it was already locked by someone else (in fact 
> it was the "old" smbd process of that same user that didn't notice the 
> client did reboot).
> The solution was always to manually kill (-TERM) the "hanging" smbd 
> process.
> The situation got a bit better when I disabled oplocks entirely, but I 
> still get that error sometimes (yes, we *almost* fixed the PC hardware 
> issues :-).
>
Just as a note, MS don't recommend storing PST files on a network and 
from personal experience I tend to agree. Some times it's the lesser of 
two evils but in the long term you might want to think about a different 
solution.
> Did you have some PC-freeze problems that the "reset on zero vc" 
> config parameter solved ?
We didn't have problems with freezing, we had problems with the network. 
It had the same effect, the client disconnected, the server thought it 
was still there.

> Did the use of this parameter have some drawbacks ?
It hasn't caused any problems that I'm aware of and it has reduced the 
number of support calls, but I wouldn't consider it an alternative to 
fixing the root of the problem.

I believe it does cause problems if you have multiple connections coming 
into the server from behind a NAT connection and it may also play up if 
you have a terminal server.

Overall I think it is a neat option and in most simple networks it is 
worth having, just be wary that it may hide problems that will bite you 
down the track.

-- Michael Heydon