Topic: Error saving Excel spreadsheets [FIXED]

[judgej]

I am having a problem on several 7.1.2 servers, saving Excel spreadsheets from XP. When I try to save to a server directory, I get the message "another user has changed this file - do you want to save a copy or overwrite" (something like that).

Some older posts hint that this may be something to do with Samba's 'opportunistic locking' and that there was a contribution for SME 6.0 that allowed Excel spreadsheets to be excluded from this locking.

However, I cannot find this contribution anywhere, and have no idea whether it would work with XME 7 anyway.

Anyone any idea what need to do to fix this issue?

-- JJ

PS Why are contributions so hard to find? There is a forums site, and a documentation site, but nothing obvious to "go to the contributions". Are they all in one place, or distributed? When I do stumble across them (usually from a forum posting) they are either out of date, or links are broken, or I need to search through a dozen more posts to find out how to install them. Any I doing something wrong, or are the contribs just not organised?

[shell]

i'm pretty sure this is the fix i used when i cam across this problem

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324491/

service packs for office apparently fix it too.

[judgej]

i'm pretty sure this is the fix i used when i cam across this problem

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324491/

service packs for office apparently fix it too.

Thanks - I'll try service pack 3.

It would still be nice to find out what the server fix was too. Presumably this 'oppotunistic locking' thing (if that is what it is called) is messing around with timestamps on lock files.

-- JJ

Update: just realised I'm already on service pack 3.

[byte]

JJ,

Have a look at this...

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/chapter/book/ch05_05.html

Now you know what's causing it, use this to resolve issue...

http://bugs.contribs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1784

[judgej]

Thankyou byte - that did the trick

For info, the following steps fixed the problem for a single i-bay for me.

First disable the op-locks for xls and mdb files (whether the extensions are case-sensitive or not, I'm not sure):

Code: [Select]

db accounts setprop myibay VetoOplockFiles '/*.xls/*.mdb/'

Expand the Samba template:

Code: [Select]

expand-template /etc/samba/smb.conf

Restart Samba:

Code: [Select]

/etc/rc7.d/S91smb restart

The works with SME 7.1.2, and may work for 7.1.1, but I doubt it would work for earlier versions (almost certainly not SME 7.0).

Hope that helps someone else!

-- JJ