[Samba] Question about Posix Locking and Windows XP/SP3 clients

Volker Lendecke Volker.Lendecke at SerNet.DE
Thu Nov 19 00:53:44 MST 2009


On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 01:49:51PM -0500, John_DeBella at notes.teradyne.com wrote:
>  We have SAMBA 3.0.33 running on RedHat 5. We are sharing home directories  
>  to users via Samba using the [homes] share. The home directories reside on 
>  a Netapp filer, (actually multiple), and are accessed by the Samba server  
>  over NFS. When  users try to open a Microsoft Excel file from a Windows XP 
>  SP3 client, it is always opening as read-only because it thinks the file   
>  is locked.  We have done some research on this as well as have discussed   
>  this with RedHat and found that this is a result of "posix locking" which  
>  is set to "yes" by default.                                                

Re-exporting NFS imports is a really, really bad idea. Why
don't you enable CIFS on the NetApp filers or even better
get rid of them at all and move the data to the Samba
servers themselves.

>  We have confirmed that turning it off does make the problem go away,       
>  however, would like to know if this is safe to do in this                  
>  configuration/scenario. I've come across some references on this but       
>  nothing definitive to whether this would be ok or if this would be asking  
>  for trouble. Given that the Samba server access and other potential access 
>  to the files on the Netapp would be over NFS would the filer take care of  
>  this sanely?                                                               

Well, if you have concurrent access to the same files, then
you should not disable posix locking. But this very much
depends on the applications you are running.

Much more important are the kernel oplocks which don't work
via NFS either.

Volker
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 197 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/samba/attachments/20091119/0bfa8474/attachment.pgp>


More information about the samba mailing list