Sun 7110 CIFS Permissions Problems

[sev9756]

Hi,

 

We're having some real problems accessing files over CIFS on our 7110.

 

We use it exclusively for CIFS use - no NFS.

 

It's joined to our AD 2003 domain and permissions are applied to domain users or domain groups.

 

We've had a few outages now where people would seemingly randomly lose access to files or folders they should have rights to.

 

There's always been another factor present - network glitches, routing problems etc that could have explained it - usually a reboot or a rejoin of the domain has fixed the problem - and the problem has always been confined to our shared area.

 

The problem has also been confined to MS Office (.xls or .doc) files.

 

Now the same problem has reared it's ugly head with our home share - one of our users can't access msoffice files in his homedir - all the permissions look fine when viewed through Windows explorer but when he tries to open anything in office he gets the message that the file is read-only.

 

I saw these threads: [samba] No write permission if POSIX bits 0 on ZFS written by M$ Office - dos_mode returning r

 

[samba] zfs acls and MS office applications

 

Which does seem to be what we are experiencing and am beginning to worry that we could have a serious problem on our hands.

 

Has anyone else encountered such problems?

 

Thanks

 

Alan

[Ric_]

Have you patched to the latest release of the software?

 

Are your home drives in the root of the share or within a folder?

 

Do you use NTP from your DC(s) to keep the time in check and prevent clock skew?

 

DNS is always worth a check too... duplicate entries, missing entries, etc.

[Duke]

I've had the odd issue but nothing I could actually put my finger on. It was stuff like a file saying it was locked so no one else could edit it or they had to open it as read-only (Excel and Publisher files mainly). I haven't had any major problems in a while, I just sometimes hear of people saying they can't access a file they should be able to, but when I investigate I can't replicate the problem myself. I did have one issue in the last month or so with a file that someone was getting permission denied on - ended up copying it and deleting the old one and that fixed it.

 

Like I said, it's hard to pinpoint and it's not something I could raise a case for, things just don't feel quite 'right' sometimes with the Windows ACLs.

 

Chris

[teejay]

Yep, we have the very occasional strange issues, especially with Excel files. What I find usually fixes it is on the folder the file is in, right click, properties, untick read-only and apply to subfolders and files. The folder will still show as read only btw, but thast usual. This kind of points to the first thread the op posted.

[john]

Yup I get it with the odd file, had it the other week with a .doc saying that it was open by the same user elsewhere but it weirdly wasn't. Has not occurred since so not worrying about it.

[sev9756]

Have you patched to the latest release of the software?

 

Are your home drives in the root of the share or within a folder?

 

Do you use NTP from your DC(s) to keep the time in check and prevent clock skew?

 

DNS is always worth a check too... duplicate entries, missing entries, etc.

 

We're currently on 2010.02.09.1.0,1-1.15 - I haven't upgraded to the latest version that came out a few weeks ago as when we upgraded to 2010.02.09.1.0,1-1.15 these Office problems "appeared" to start - although they may well have been there before but just hadn't reared their ugly head yet....

 

Our home drives are in the root of a share - we use NTP so the box is in sync with the DC's - DNS looks fine no strange entries there.

 

From the windows explorer GUI the permissions look like:

 

Administrators\Full Control

Our_AD_Admin_Group\Full Control

User_Domain_accounf\Full Control

SYSTEM\Full Control

[amw]

File access problems like this are not related to NTP or DNS, and definitely not to Samba bugs (there's no Samba code in the 7110). This looks like an open mode conflict against an existing or previous open. Does this happen after a file has been opened by multiple users or when a single user is re-opening a file shortly after closing it?

 

I'm running 2010.02.09.2.0,1-1.17 and I haven't heard of any similar issues - it might be worth considering an upgrade. If these issues persist, I'd recommend opening a support case with Oracle.

[Duke]

I've opened a case before, but the issue is so intermittent and hard to pin-point it never got anywhere. Here's my notes for that case:

 

• Sun 7410 has a CIFS share as ‘resources’. This goes through a Windows 2003 server to provide DFS centralised mapping as \\domain.local\common\Resources. This in turn is then provided to our users as a mapped drive R:
  
• This setup has only been live since the start of September but is starting to cause issues with files either being locked or not updating correctly.
  
• Issue 1: Person A opens a file which is stored on the SAN, makes changes to the file then saves it. Person B then opens it on a different PC and the changes aren't there. Person A opens the file and their changes are there.
  
• Issue 2: Person A opens a file, makes changes and saves it, then closes the file. Person B tries to open it but gets a Windows error that the file cannot be opened because it is in use and locked by someone else. Alternatively, Person A opens the file, makes changes, then when they try to save it they are warned the file may have been changed by another user, even if they are the only person working on the file.
  

 

Unless I had a reliable. reproducible test-case and it was a major issue, I don't think Oracle would get anywhere with it.

 

Chris

[amw]

Issue 1 is almost certainly due to something external to the 7410; perhaps client-side caching, edge-caching, proxy-caching or WAN accelerator.

 

Issue 2: I recall an issue from a while ago related to a file having been changed by another user. I'll see if I can dig up some information on that. Again, this could be be caused by a WAN accelerator because they play tricks with time stamps and locks to reduce over-the-wire traffic.

 

Are you using any client/proxy/edge caching or a WAN accelerator product?

[amw]

Follow-up... Issue 2 looks similar to: 6830187 False message when saving a Excel 2003 file. This resulted in a message of the form, "The file 'filename.xls' may have been changed by another user since you last saved it" even though it had only been opened by a single user. This was fixed a while ago but I don't know the release/build number.

[Duke]

Issue 1) There's no proxy/caching/WAN set up. Clients do go through a DFS path provided by a Windows server, but they're still talking directly to the S7000 once the path has been resolved. I haven't seen this exact issue in a while (that case was from a while ago) so it may well not be a problem any more.

 

Issue 2) Again, haven't seen this in a while so it may be fixed too. It was mainly Publisher files, which really can't be opened by two people at once (Office usually doesn't even give you the option to open a read-only copy). Of course, with 800 potential users of the file, it's possible someone else did have it open even when I'd been assured no one would have...

 

Like I said, it's an old case and there haven't been any problems identical to that in a while. More recent stuff just seems to have been ACL 'glitches', but it's hard to be more specific than that.