Topic: Record Locking in Samba

[Andy parkinson]

I today installed 5.1.2 for a customer of mine in place of an ageing netware 3.12 system. Everything went fine and just as we were congratulating ourselvers on how easy the job had been we decided to try and access the customers database  from two machines simultaneously only to find it wouldn't let us. I have searched all of the forums about this and know it is a problem with record locking and that samba is locking the file a not the record but have not been able to work out what to do. The database is a Dos based system. I have tried playing about with the oportunistic locking settings in smb.conf and restarting ther service  but to no avail.

[Devlyn Davis]

You might want to look into upgrading to the latest version of Samba.  It apparently addresses problems with serving up database files.

-Dev

[stitch]

do the workstations have a Novell client? I recall later versions of the client having opportunistic lock settings that can be changed.

just a thought

[Andy parkinson]

No I removed the Novell client with the Unc32 utility to remove all traces of it before I started but thanks for the thought. In my last post by way of experimentation I intalled Samba 2.2.3 following Darrell May and Charlie Brady's How to and although I haven't been able to test yet whether this will sort my problem out it has resolved some other long standing problems. The problem of home drives not being mapped when using the net use  h: /home appears to be resolved in both win ME and win 2000 and I am assuming that is the case with Win98 and 95.
stitch wrote:
>
> do the workstations have a Novell client? I recall later
> versions of the client having opportunistic lock settings
> that can be changed.
>
> just a thought

[Andy parkinson]

Could anyone tell me how to upgrade to Samba 2.2.4 I have tried the RPM from www.samba.org but it won't let me install it as it complains about dependencies even with nodeps.

[Alex Ziemann]

Hi,

there is a known problem with many databases like borland paradox and ms-access on samba. This has something to do with caching and locking of samba.

I never needed to really solve it but there are some parms in smb.conf, that have to be changed. I am sorry, but i am not able to post the "real and right" parms here - i just forgot.

Try a google search on newsgroups with "access AND locking" - you will probably find it.

No need to upgrade to samba beyond 2.2.3a ; just change that parms.

[Todd Pearsall]

I've heard of this problem being solved by adding:

oplocks = no

in the [globals] section of the smb.conf.  

Haven't tried it myself, so use at your own risk

- Todd

[Andy parkinson]

Thanks Todd I believe that this option is enabled in smb.conf by default anyway. In my smb.conf there is the line
oplocks = false
I have managed to get a copy of the offending database now and I tried to put  it on my own network and reproduce the problem but I have found that I also get the same effect when running it off a Windows 2000 share point as well. So my problem is less of an SME problem and more of a netware /windows issue.
 

Todd Pearsall wrote:
>
> I've heard of this problem being solved by adding:
>
> oplocks = no
>
> in the [globals] section of the smb.conf.  
>
> Haven't tried it myself, so use at your own risk
>
> - Todd