We noticed a common problem to all OS & Office versions in our company regarding the file server we use. Every time we open an Excel or Powerpoint document on the file server (Linux Samba server) the timestamp of the document is updated with the open timestamp even if we don't save the document! This occur only when we open an Excel or Powerpoint document on the samba share. The problem doesn't occur on the local disk of any client. And this is regardless the client's OS & Office version. Thank you for any help. Best regards, Suleyman Gultekin Platform info: ============== Samba server HW : Intel Dual Xeon 3 GHz CPU OS : RedHat Advanced Server 2.4.21-9.0.1.ELsmp Name : samba Relocations: (not relocatable) Version : 3.0.4 Vendor: Red Hat, Inc. Release : 6.3E Build Date: Tue Jul 20 15:44:09 2004 Install Date: Tue Aug 10 17:52:44 2004 Build Host: tweety.build.redhat.com Group : System Environment/Daemons Source RPM: samba-3.0.4-6.3E.src.rpm Size : 25693830 License: GNU GPL Version 2 Signature : DSA/SHA1, Wed Jul 21 04:59:53 2004, Key ID 219180cddb42a60e Packager : Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla> URL : http://www.samba.org/ Summary : The Samba SMB server. Clients: ======== Windows 2000 Pro SP4 (Intel P4) Win XP SP1 (Intel P4) Office 2000 - 2002 - 2003
In our company we are having the same problem. Actually, excel and ppoint files are modified whenever they are open (because they have the lock embedded, in contrast to word files), but office restores their modification time when they are closed. For some reason, when a file is in a samba server, the modification time cannot be restored when the file is closed. This is not nice because we used to find very useful to trust modification time of these files. Samba version: 3.0.5 (on Debian) Clients: Windows 2000 Regards, Maximiliano Pin
In our company we are having the same problem. Actually, excel and powerpoint filesare modified whenever they are open This is not nice because we used to find very useful to sort on the date of an file.
I do see that the files get their timestamp changed when it is opened by Excel, but I also see it getting changed back after the file is closed. Could somebody perhaps attach a network trace illustrating this problem? -Marc
I discovered more information about this. The problem only happens when the user who opens the file is different from the user who created the file. I'm talking about UNIX users. In our configuration, we have two users, user1 and user2, and many windows machines connecting with those users. Both are in the same group, group1. And masks in smb.conf are such than files created are like these: -rwxrw---- 1 user1 group1 13824 Nov 19 09:48 proof.xls* -rwxrw---- 1 user2 group1 11776 Nov 19 10:01 proof2.xls* If someone using "user2" opens "proof.xls", the problem appears. But, if I make "chown user2 proof.xls" the problem disappears!! And vice-versa. I tried changing the modification time of proof.xls being user2 (with touch -t), and it's impossible! (remember user2 is in group1, and has write access to the file) user2@server$ touch proof.xls (No problem with this.) user2@server$ touch -t "11191024" proof.xls touch: setting times of `proof2.xls': Operation not permitted This could be linux-specific. This bug seems to have no easy solution, maybe smbd could treat modification time changes as root, instead of switching to the correct user, in this special request.
> This could be linux-specific. This bug seems to have no easy solution, maybe > smbd could treat modification time changes as root, instead of switching to the > correct user, in this special request. Im sorry for my english. Maybe it is possible to give an user root rights and see if the problem is still there. Can someone try this?
http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2004-May/086562.html See this link.
> This could be linux-specific. This bug seems to have no easy solution, maybe > smbd could treat modification time changes as root, instead of switching to the > correct user, in this special request. This is not linux-specific; I'm seeing the same problem with Solaris and the current release of Samba (the CSW builds from http://blastwave.org/).
please retest with the 3.0.11 release. It is possible that jra's sticky mtime fix tookcare of this.
sorry for the same, cleaning up the database to prevent unecessary reopens of bugs.
oh - this "bug" is not even samba specific - it is excel specific, as excel does dirty tricks. when opening for reading, excel stores the username in it and on closing, it restores the original timestamp when the file had not been changed in excel. the file on disk indeed IS being changed - as the user last accessing it is saved in the file - but robocopy or rsync will never know if they do not binary compare with the target file to be "synced". came across this during a fileserver migration..... don't know if recent excel versions still do this....
apparently, recent excel still does - and m$ even managed to introduce another bug with this ;) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/948355/en-us http://support.microsoft.com/kb/826741