Samba share (cifs utils) and Libreoffice: Files get deleted under particular circumstances

Alexander de Lioncourt

11/2/23, 12:31 PM

Our company has experienced a terrible bug when dealing with Libreoffice and samba shared documents and we can reproduce it every time.

What we've got:

Samba share on a windows PC (we tried with linux samba share and it's the same). Just one account to access it, so all PCs use the same login and password to access the share, but it doesn't matter coz the bug happens even when using different samba accounts.

Several Ubuntu 20.04 PCs and several Windows 10 PCs.

Ubuntu 20.04 PCs have access to the share via cifs utils (fstab) : //srv-dc-02/uc /mnt/EDU2022 cifs credentials=/etc/win-credentials-1,uid=1000,gid=1000,dir_mode=0777,file_mode=0777,iocharset=utf8,nobrl,_netdev 0 0

The version of Libreoffice doesn't matter. We tried the default Ubuntu 20.04 LO version and the latest one.

Steps to reproduce this bug:

Ubuntu User1 opens a document and starts working on it.

Ubuntu User2 opens the same document in "read only" or "copy" mode.

Ubuntu User1 tries to save the file and immediately gets "the file is missing" error.

At this point the file is deleted from the samba share.

If Ubuntu User2 closes the read only version of the file, then Ubuntu User1 can actually save the file and restores it on the samba share. if Ubuntu User1 closes the opened file it permanently disappears from the share.

This bug is only experienced when Ubuntu+Ubuntu PCs are interacting with the share. If it's Ubuntu+Windows the bug doesn't happen.

Is there a way to fix this?

144

1 + 2

samba

cifs

libreoffice

David

11/2/23, 12:45 PM

With the multi access at the same time it gets confused and kills the file. Not surprised. Not sure you can do anything about this the way you access the files.

Alexander de Lioncourt

11/2/23, 7:36 PM

This is not how it is supposed to work. No one is asking about a shared file editing. Only one person can edit a file and others can view it in a read-only mode. And it is working properly when it comes to using Linux-Windows PCs.. The issue only arises if we have 2 Linux-Linux users.

Score:0

Ubuntu

Rowland Penny

11/2/23, 1:40 PM

You do not seem to have Samba involved here. You are mounting something from a Windows machine using cifs-utils, which has nothing to do with Samba.

You need to find out how Windows does 'oplocks', these allow the originator to take control of files and 'lock out' others from doing more than reading. You also need to find out how Windows etc opens files in programs like Libreoffice, which tends to go like this: Open file, create temp file, delete original file, work on file, write new file when closing and delete temp file.

Finally, I repeat, none of this has anything to do with Samba, or did you mean SMB ?

+ 1

Alexander de Lioncourt

11/2/23, 7:36 PM

Yeah I meant smb

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Samba share (cifs utils) and Libreoffice: Files get deleted under particular circumstances

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