[Samba] Office products Locking issues

[Marcello Romani]

Michael Heydon ha scritto:
> 
>>
>> 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 

The company I work for has had pst files on a network share for many 
years now (on a win2k server and, since about 1 year, that is since I 
came, on a gentoo/samba server). I still haven't seen any problems (a 
part from the mentioned pc freezing issues), but our network and servers 
have a very low load...

> two evils but in the long term you might want to think about a different 
> solution.

I've been thinking about implementing an imap server for some time 
now... I hope I'll have time to get rid of "personal stored" e-mail as 
soon as possibile...

>> 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.

We don't have neither of the two, so I guess I'll be safe :-)

> 
> 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
> 
> 

Thank you for your reply. It was helpful.


-- 
Marcello Romani
Responsabile IT
Ottotecnica s.r.l.
http://www.ottotecnica.com