msoffice / samba problem

[willawake]

i was finally getting my shit together to launch the new linux server at work. it is months delayed, i have so much shit to do. i thought the config was finally ready but testing today revealed a weird problem.

the last issue was that the documents on the server were read/write only by the creator of the file. the rest got it read only. i changed the samba conf to make the owner of the file the creator and the users group get read/write. so this solved the problem and all users get read write.

so i was doing some testing and had a word document open. word is set to save autorecovery every 10 mins. but when it saves an autorecovery i periodically get "autorecovery is postponed". it is msoffice 97 (yeh i am trying to get 2003 passed through the budget)

since the creating, saving, opening of word files is no prob i assume that there is a permissions prob for the autorecovery files also. the users are logging on fine though.

i will post my samba conf tomorrow and other log files if someone can assist, pls tell me what i need to post. i found few info on the net also the great wisdom of turning off autorecovery which is not an option.

[willawake]

Re: msoffice / samba problem

ok i solved this one. the solution was to make a public samba share to use as a scratch disk for the word autorecovery files.

[scratch]

comment = Users Temp Files
path = /home/scratch
browseable = yes
read only = no
public = yes
writeable = yes
force create mode = 0777
force directory mode = 0777

you can set word 97 to use a specific location for the autorecovery files in Options/File Locations

basically what happens is there is some problem with permissions of the autorecovery files when they are stored by default in the samba share from where the file was opened or created. basically word wants to make these files, delete them, rename them etc.

another way to do it was to set the autorecovery files to be located on the users hard disk. this was not possible since we are using win2k ntfs so there are permission problems there also. i think it would be possible on fat32.

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another problem i solved today which i was worried about was the slow upload to the server from my computer. download was fine. i thought i was going to have to config the switch better and start reading up on cisco ios or get into nic driver configs etc, samba tweaks....... no the lan card i had used was hardware set to 100mb half-duplex. i picked that up on the show interfaces on the cisco.

setting it to auto, auto made the upload fine (whew)