I am an experienced Ubuntu Linux user, but the fact is that I need some help. I recently set up a "venerable"(Pentium 4, single-core, 2.4 GHz, 32-bit architecture) machine with Ubuntu Linux version 10.04 server-i386. My objective is to set up a "kiosk" directory on it which everyone(including guests) on my SOHO network can read from and write to.

I have designated the directory "kiosk"(no surprise there) and defined it in smb.conf. It is directly under the "home" directory, as path = /home/kiosk and set the file permissions as drwxrwxrwx or, if you prefer, like chmod 777. I have a separate machine, System Librarian running Ubuntu Linux 10.04 Desktop amd64 on the network(via Wi-Fi) and a second separate machine running Windows XP Pro, with SP3, also on the network this time via Fast EtherNet(100 Mbs).

From the Linux machine, I can read a complete file list, but I cannot "open" an RTF or an ODT doc in the kiosk directory. When I try to do so, OpenOffice.org simply "opens" a blank, untitled document. JPEG and PNG files in the kiosk directory open just fine. I cannot write to the kiosk directory from this machine, either.

From the Windows XP machine, by contrast, I can list files, open RTF and ODT docs(using Microsoft WordPad) and write file to it without any apparent problems.

The file format on the server(Iguanodon) is ext4. Obviously, I have made some sort of mistake in setting this share up, but it is not obvious to me. Does anyone have any helpful suggestion or suggestions?

When you mount the samba share from the linux guest what mount parameters are you using? Have you designated an appropriate umask to allow read/write access?

You might also want to look at the permissions of the mount point. I used to mount network shares in /media or /mnt but recently switched to mounting them in a folder called Network in the users "$HOME" directory so they inherit full control by default.

My "kiosk" directory is directly under /home, as noted above. I set the share permissions in smb.conf under "[kiosk]" as "create mask = 0777" initially, but I recently thought better of it and re-set them to "create mask = 0755". JPEG, ASCII files(*.txt) and Adobe Acrobat files(*.pdf) have been opening up remotely without a problem. But formatted text files written under Microsoft Wordpad and OpenOffice.org (*.odt, *.rtf and *.doc) have stalled when I tried to open them remotely. There were no error messages. When I copied one of these files to a local directory on the remote machine, they open up okay.

I did not initially use the "mount" command line utility nor did I designate a specific account on the Server, but with your suggestion in hand, I will be sure to try that.

I will get back to you with the results shortly. G'day.

Those office files might be trying to do writes as part of the execute process (MS-Office likes to create hidden automatic backups of files as you're working on them), which would cause a blank file to load instead if the local machine mount access mask is wrong, the wrong uid is defined, or the wrong permissions are applied to the local mount point.

I'm no expert but I do have a lot of experience working with the Samba, NetBIOS, and Server Messaging Block Protocol so I have a pretty standard process for standing up file servers and clients. If you're not using Active Directory, OpenLDAP, or NDS (in other words a peer to peer architecture) then you need to create an account for every user (same user name and same password) on the samba server and on all the clients. If there is only one share and it is global then you could get by with just creating a single account on the samba and creating that account on all the linux clients for use during the mount.

When the mount operation is executed you need to define the uid of the account which matches the account on the samba server and grant the umask. If the umask is not defined in the mount, then it doesn't matter how you have the samba server configured, you won't get the correct access.


Good Luck!

Thank-you, Thund3rstruck, but I did find a set of work-arounds to this problem several days ago.

To start with, I had tried to save both the RTF files and ODT files on "Shared" directory on another machine. This did not work with ODT and RTF files which I had created with OpenOffice.org. The OpenOffice.org Word Processor Module--for a reason unknown to me--places a "lock file" in the remote directory(".lock*.odt#"), which causes a blank document to be brought up instead of the real document which I had wanted to open. Apparently the programmers at OpenOffice.org do not want a user such as myself making this type of use of their program, or perhaps this solves another problem for them which I am not aware of. The file(RTF or ODT) is not damaged. It can be downloaded to another machine(or even the one used to create it) and opened from a local directory there without problems.

If, on the other hand, you save a formatted text file as an HTML file to that shared directory, no lock is placed on it and it can be opened from a remote machine without a problem. Therefore, I have three functional work-arounds: 1) --just save the file to the Shared Directory on the remote machine as an HTML file using OpenOffice.org; 2) --download the file from the Shared Directory to a local directory and open it from there; or, 3) --structure it as an HTML file in the first place, creating it with KOMPOZ or manually making it up as a text file.

Thund3rstruck, thank you for the information, but with that information in hand and these three work-arounds, I am going to close this Thread and classify the Question as having been answered.