[Samba] XP SP3 and posix locking

Dirk Kastens dkastens at uos.de
Fri Jun 6 11:42:50 GMT 2008


Hi,

the home directories of our users are NFS-mounted from a NetApp filer to 
our samba server. Everthing was fine until the users installed the 
service pack 3 for Windows XP on the client machines. Suddenly it was 
impossible to write MS Office files on the samba share. Word or Excel 
documents could only be opened in read-only mode. After de-installing 
SP3 everything worked well again.
I found out that setting the samba option "posix locking = No" resolves 
the problem. The manual page of smb.conf says: "You should never need to 
disable this parameter." So I think this is only a temporary solution. 
Microsoft must have changed something regarding the locking mechanism 
inside the service pack.
Any ideas?

Our samba environment:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 5.2 (Tikanga)
Kernel 2.6.18-53.1.4.el5
Samba 3.0.30

Regards,

Dirk Kastens


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