Categories
MS Windows Vista 7, 8 etc Open Source Samba

Fix for Windows 7 offline files and Samba

Further to my blog posts involving vista (and the tweaks that can help make Vista/Windows 7 compatible with Samba) I came across a registry setting that needs to be changed to get offline files to work correctly:

“Set the following registry key on the Windows Vista client to prevent files from getting pulled down to the client again right after synchronizing changes to the server (due to Linux file systems having coarser timestamp resolution than Windows):

Create a DWORD value named RoundUpWriteTimeOnSync under the HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\NetCache key (create the key if it does not exist) and set it to 1.” from the Storage Team at Microsoft’s Blog: http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/archive/2007/03/16/using-offline-files-with-samba-emc-servers-nas-devices.aspx

Categories
Linux Samba Technology

Getting support for a small company Ubuntu Server installation

Why are most (small) IT support companies not interested in supporting Linux? If you are an IT support provider in the London area who can support a small network of Windows XP PCs and a Ubuntu (Samba) Fileserver (which pretty much takes care of itself) please get in touch!

I will post up details when I find someone on this in due course. [Edit opps I should have done more Googling before posting – it looks like Canonical might offer what I am after – but what I am saying here holds up – support for both Windows & Linux from IT support providers is needed…]

I think this could be an interesting/lucrative potential market – stop selling the over priced and bloated MS server offerings and sell the more cost effective and robust Ubuntu Linux based solutions for small businesses. What with web based management systems its got to be the way to go. Particular as lots of basic NAS boxes are going down the embedded Linux route.

Surely some of the saving in licensing costs can be passed on to the customer and some kept back as improved margin? I guess what this really needs to take off is a robust Open Source Email/Calendaring solution (Exchange Server killer) – I suspect Exchange is the reason a lot of businesses still go for Windows Server.

Categories
Linux Samba Ubuntu

Ubuntu Server Kernel Opps turned out to be faulty memory

The title of this one says it all really, but after spending hours scratching my head with a office file server I built for L.S.A. Ltd (www.travelf1.com) late last year I found the solution to the crashes that started occuring a couple of weeks ago.

See this Ubuntu Server Crash Output file – for the error message that was appearing basically it was a Kernel Oops that occurred when large files were being copied/transferred via samba. It turned out to one of the memory DIMMs going weird which I discovered after having the idea to run a Memtest on the machine (Memtest is available as a boot option when starting up a Ubuntu machine). At first I suspected the software RAID 1 but that’s actually been rock solid on this box and on my home Ubuntu server too.

Categories
MS Windows Vista 7, 8 etc Samba

Using Vista Offline Files with a Samba Share

So after tearing my hair out for the last week with Vista – almost to the point when I was going to put Windows XP back on – I have finally got Vista Offline files working with my Samba shares…

I like to move the My Documents folder on each of my machines from the C: drive to a network share that lives on my Linux file server – on my laptop I make that available offline – in case I am away from home etc. On Windows XP this was fine and worked pretty well. I recently upgraded to Vista and mapped the drive for my home directory – all good made it available offline (or “Always available offline” as Vista now calls it). It did its initial sync and all was good.

Next time I logon (and after making sure I am connected to the network) I go back to my network drive to make sure its working online – and nope it isn’t! I make sure I can ping the machine – thats okay and I can access the share online if I access the machine by its ip – \\192.168.1.4\share. Very weird and very frustrating!

Whilst searching for the solution I came across some useful info on making sure Samba is setup correctly for offline files (mainly to do with oplocks – see below for a useful link).

Anyway tonight I have a brain wave whilst looking at Vista’s user management stuff and reading some more stuff on the net. It turns out that Vista’s offline files works per user rather than per share and as a result is more reliant on usernames and passwords. My Samba share uses a different password to my vista login. So I made them the same – and hey presto it works!

So in summary if using offline files in Vista make sure your usernames and passwords match. I also think I’ve seen something under the user accounts section that lets you link in different user account details – but I haven’t tried that yet. Here is a screenshot.
Vista Network Password Screenshot

Vista Offline Files Samba Settings Link Broken as of June 08 ;-(