Specific client application problems

Samba FAQ
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# Chapter 4. Specific client application problems

# 4.1. MS Office Setup reports "Cannot change properties of '\MSOFFICE\SETUP.INI'"

When installing MS Office on a Samba drive for which you have admin user permissions, ie. admin users = username, you will find the setup program unable to complete the installation.

To get around this problem, do the installation without admin user permissions The problem is that MS Office Setup checks that a file is rdonly by trying to open it for writing.

Admin users can always open a file for writing, as they run as root. You just have to install as a non-admin user and then use "chown -R" to fix the owner.

# 4.2. How to use a Samba share as an administrative share for MS Office, etc.

Microsoft Office products can be installed as an administrative installation from which the application can either be run off the administratively installed product that resides on a shared resource, or from which that product can be installed onto workstation clients.

The general mechanism for implementing an adminstrative installation involves running X:\setup /A, where X is the drive letter of either CDROM or floppy.

This installation process will NOT install the product for use per se, but rather results in unpacking of the compressed distribution files into a target shared folder. For this process you need write privilidge to the share and it is desirable to enable file locking and share mode operation during this process.

Subsequent installation of MS Office from this share will FAIL unless certain precautions are taken. This failure will be caused by share mode operation which will prevent the MS Office installation process from re-opening various dynamic link library files and will cause sporadic file not found problems.

- As soon as the administrative installation (unpacking) has completed set the following parameters on the share containing it:

      	[MSOP95]
      		path = /where_you_put_it
      		comment = Your comment
      		volume = "The_CD_ROM_Label"
      		read only = yes
      		available = yes
      		share modes = no
      		locking = no
      		browseable = yes
      		public = yes

- Now you are ready to run the setup program from the Microsoft Windows workstation as follows: \\"Server_Name"\MSOP95\msoffice\setup

# 4.3. Microsoft Access database opening errors

Here are some notes on running MS-Access on a Samba drive from Stefan Kjellberg

Opening a database in 'exclusive' mode does NOT work. Samba ignores r/w/share modes on file open.
Make sure that you open the database as 'shared' and to 'lock modified records'
Of course locking must be enabled for the particular share (smb.conf)

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