CIFS Excel timestamp problem

[Doug Wyatt]

From my searches, it looks like this one's been recognized
in Samba on and off for a while. There are two Samba bug
reports on this issue, 22126 and 22287, but it doesn't seem
like anyone is looking into a fix.

The issue is that when a Windows user opens a file on a CIFS
share with Excel (2k or XP are the only ones I've tested) and
the user is not the owner of the file (but does have write
perms), all three HP-UX side timestamps (mtime, ctime, atime)
will be changed even when the file is closed without issuing
a 'Save' or 'Save as'. If the user owns the file, the original
mtime will be preserved.

FWIW, I've noticed that when a file owned by a user other than the one
using Excel (2k and XP, from Win2k) is opened in Excel, the unix side
atime changes to reflect the access. It's not until the user closes
the file in Excel that the atime, mtime and ctime all change to reflect
the date/time of the closing of the file.

This is not an Excel auto-save issue. I appears to have something to
do with Excel creating a copy of the file on Open and then replacing
the original file with the copy on Close.

In our case, our Samba server is HP's CIFS/9000 (A.01.09.05), a Samba
2.2.x deriative, I believe.

Do HP's CIFS support people read this list? Does anyone else have
any ideas - other than requiring all users to look like the same user
to CIFS?

[Steven E. Protter]

1) There has been a recent security update.

CIFS/9000

Here is a link to the free software:

http://www.software.hp.com/cgi-bin/swdepot_parser.cgi/cgi/displayProductInfo.pl?productNumber=B8725AA


2) If the times on the two systems were synched off the same time server, this could not happen. At least I think not.

ntp stuff.
http://www.ntp.org/

Documentation
http://www.ntp.org/documentation.html

ntp is built into HP-UX and there is a valid time server linked on Dr. Mill's site that will let you set up a Microsoft based ntp server that will correctly update HP-UX.

SEP

[Steven E. Protter]

BTW, yes, HP has many people reading and participating in these forums.

If you have specific questions with regard to CIFS, you can post a question to the main itrc web site asking how to make contact.

I believe your issue may be caused by time inconsistencies on the two boxes, as my prior post should have said.

SEP

[Doug Wyatt]

As I mentioned, we're running A.01.09.05, which
is as far as I can tell the most recent update
for CIFS. I installed it soon after it became
available, thanks to BugTraq.

The issue here is clearly not a matter of time
sync, the issue is that Excel is changing the
file's mtime despite the fact that the file was
only read, not written. And this happens only
when a user other that the file owner reads it.
The only way I can see to prevent this from
happening is to limit write perms to the owner,
but that doesn't play well in a cooperative
work environment.

We are also running ASU/9000 as the PDC on a
10.20 system and this problem does not occur
on those shares. But AS/U was derived from NT
Server source code licensed by AT&T.

FWIW, I've had xntpd or ntpd running on all
HP-UX, Linux and Windows hosts (from five-ten
s/w) since we phased out our old Apollo
workstations which were time sync'd with
timed. I might look for a crashed ntpd service
if the issue was a few seconds or minutes of
time difference, but not when a file that has
not been changed for months suddenly has a
current date/time after someone looks at it
with Excel.

Honestly, it appears that this is a problem in
the way Excel operates, but MS has shown for
a long time that MS isn't interested in making
their software more compatible with anything
but their software, unless there's a hook
which will eventually draw more customers into
the MS fold.

I believed that HP had some developers who were
contributing to the Samba project and I hoped
that maybe they would look into the issue,
since it doesn't seem to be getting any attention based on the two unresolved Samba
bug reports.

Doug