Black hole shares

[Andrew Tridgell]

> Microsoft Office (and other Windows packages) wants to write to
> ridiculous files that it has no reason to, system DLLs, its own .EXEs and 
> the like. This is what makes it so very hard to run Office from a network 
> server, NT or any other. There are ways, but they are all very nasty.

it wants to *write* to them?? are you sure? (I won't believe it till I
see network traces).

I know it opens them with locking modes saying that it intends to
write (ie. it uses the DENY modes incorrectly). That is a well known
problem. The really stupid solution that MS use to work around that is
to define in the CIFS spec that all share modes on .dll, .exe, .sym
files (and a few others) should be ignored. This allows apps that were
written for local hard disks with no concern for locking to still have
a chance of functioning on a network. It also means you can never do
safe updates of these files remotely :-(

When I learnt about this stupidity and that MS were going to enshrine
it in the CIFS spec I was really amazed. Still, to be compatible with
NT we had to add it to Samba, even though it stinks.

If office is really *writing* to these files then something is really
seriously wrong. Do you have any sniffs of this?

Cheers, Andrew