[Samba] Intermittent <MRxSMB; W50:> "Delayed Write Failed" when writing to Office 2007's "Recent Files" index.dat on a network share

[Andrew Chadwick]

We're in the process of upgrading our WinXP SP3 users to Office 2007 on
a network where %APPDATA% is on a Samba 3.2.5 network share, and our
testing users are getting dialogged approximately once a day with the
message "Delayed Write Failed : Windows was unable to save all the data
for the file
\windows\settings\appdata\Microsoft\Office\Recent\index.dat". That's
both annoying and scary, so we'd like to make it go away for our users
somehow.

Has anyone else seen any situations like these? We've tried various
things with Samba, but to no avail.

For our domain, %APPDATA% is on a network drive mapping accessed via a
drive letter which is established on logon by our network logon script.
The drive letter is referred to in "Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/User
Shell Folders/appdata" in the Default User registry on our reference
image. The area is writeable and unique for each user (it's in their
[homes] share), and users do not to our knowledge run two sessions at
once on different PCs. This arrangement usually doesn't cause any
problems for apps, but is there any known Office 2007 behaviour that
would cause what we do to be a Very Silly Idea? Office XP, in our
experience, never did this.


The dialog in full:

> Application popup: Windows - Delayed Write Failed : Windows was
> unable to save all the data for the file
> \windows\settings\appdata\Microsoft\Office\Recent\index.dat. The data
> has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer
> hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file
> elsewhere.

it presents in our system logs as

> Apr 18 10:46:27 revdnsXXX pcXXXXX NT: <MRxSmb;W50;> {Delayed Write
> Failed} Windows was unable to save all the data for the file
> \Device\LanmanRedirector. The data has been lost. This error may be
> caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection.
> Please try to save this file elsewhere.

(together with a message about the associated <Application Popup;I26;>)


http://support.microsoft.com/kb/890352 doesn't seem relevant because we
don't run Win Server 2003 on our desktops, and this isn't a UNC path.

We've confirmed that the driver files mentioned in
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/321733 are the same on our Office 2007
testers' machines as on our everyday Office XP machines.

We've messed with opportunistic locking in Samba

> [homes]
>     #...
>     veto oplock files = /*.foo/index.dat/
>     #...

but to no avail. Additionally, `testparm -sv` is showing

> client signing = auto
> server signing = No

so this probably isn't SMB signing since that should negotiate to off.


Let me know if you need any further information.

-- 
Andrew Chadwick, Computer Systems Administrator, Cancer Epidemiology,
Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Oxford,
Postcode: OX3 7LF (or OX3 7DG for couriers and GPS)
Tel +44 1865 2 89 623  PGP: A9E830A4 9ECE93F7 65FDC0D1 030D7699 D0C02C4D

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