3.2 / 3.2.1 Can't open files on Windows / Samba / cifs share

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permutation-jim
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Jun 08, 2010 11:25 am

3.2 / 3.2.1 Can't open files on Windows / Samba / cifs share

Post by permutation-jim »

Folks,

I have a workaround thread started here, but want to track the problem in this thread.

OO files saved to my NAS drive using my previous version of OpenOffice (3.1.1) running on Fedora 11 now cannot be opened by OpenOffice 3.2 nor 3.2.1 on my new PC running Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx). I get a general and undescriptive error that it must recover, well, nothing (it's blank).

If I copy said file to my local hard drive and open it from there, I have no problems. If I save it locally, then copy that file back to the Samba share, it often works fine from that point forward.

The NAS is Linux/BDS based (a Synology box) and I access the drive via cifs (static mounts in my /etc/fstab file).

I have tried accessing the same files using FUSE to get to the NAS drive, and that seems to work correctly. However FUSE creates other problems and is not the recommended way for Fedora/Ubuntu to access Samba shares.

Trolling around, this appears to be a common problem, though the lack of diagnostic information (no obvious error messages) has made it hard to idnetify the cause.

I've not found an effective way to uninstall OpenOffice 3.2.1 and install OpenOffice 3.1.1 into Ubuntu 10.04, which might at least get us back up and running.

Is anyone here having this problem and has anyone come up with a solution / workaround? It seems like a major issue (it's effectively halted my business for two days) and I'm surprised more folks aren't up in arms.

-Jim
Ubuntu 10.04 / OpenOffice 3.2.0 UK
Tell
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Jul 06, 2010 3:47 pm

Re: 3.2 / 3.2.1 Can't open files on Windows / Samba / cifs s

Post by Tell »

Hello,
I did encounter a similar issue and had quite some trouble finding a solution that did work for me.
I'll start with "my" solution first (that I actually found here: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=104974), see below for more details on the error :
Solution: Adding the mount option "nobrl" when mounting a CIFS share did save my day.

Code: Select all

mount //Windows/Share /local/dir -t cifs -o nobrl,username...
More Details on the issue as it did affect me:
Starting with OpenOffice version 3.2 and/or Ubuntu 10.04 when trying to read or write an OpenOffice Document on a Windows Share, OpenOffice did always crash, going to the document recovery dialog. Editing MS Office documents usually did work o.k., also no problems when using a Samba Share.
As soon as the document was fully read from the Share (eg. by just copying it somewhere else) everything appeared to be o.k. as well - as long as I didn't restart my PC or remounted the Share.

Several research attempts (aka. googling :-) led to several workarounds that didn't work for me. But finally the above mentioned mount nobrl option ("no byte range locking") did indeed help.
As far as I am trying to guess what it means, it's something like OpenOffice trying to just set a lock not for the whole file but only a part of it (some byte range), however this doesn't seem to work well either with Windows based CIFS Shares in general or with this particular combination of OpenOffice version, cifs on Linux version and cifs on Windows implementation.
Whatever it may be - so far it looks like the nobrl Option did solve the issue for me, which started to look like a real show stopper for using OpenOffice.

Hope this helps someone else as well.
Regards,
Tell
OpenOffice 3.2.0 on Ubuntu 10.04
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