Being an evil CIFS admin

[anodos]

I have some users who routinely open files, lock their workstations, and leave the office. In some situations another user needs write-access to the file.

I know that I can use smbstatus to find and kill the PID associated with the annoying user's samba session and release the oplock on that particular file. This has the semi-unfortunate side-effect of killing the user's entire session. Is there a way to do this for only a single file?

 

[cyberjock]

Not easily, no. Killing the PID is the only way I know of to solve resolve the problems with these pesky users.

Another way is to find out if they need write access to the file. If they open it only to look then give them read-only permissions. Then they can look without locking the file.

 

[socos]

If your FreeNAS server is joined to an Active Directory domain you could try managing the FreeNAS in Computer Management.

Open compmgmt.msc, right click the 'Computer Management (Local)', Connect to another computer, enter your FreeNAS hostname, click OK. You may get an ugly Firewall error dialog saying to enable certain rules (it tells you which ones to enable).

After that, navigate to: System Tools > Shared Folders > Open Files. Look for the file in question, right click it and then 'Close Open File'.

Not sure if this works on FreeNAS, but it has worked for me on NetApps in the past.

 

[anodos]

If your FreeNAS server is joined to an Active Directory domain you could try managing the FreeNAS in Computer Management.

Open compmgmt.msc, right click the 'Computer Management (Local)', Connect to another computer, enter your FreeNAS hostname, click OK. You may get an ugly Firewall error dialog saying to enable certain rules (it tells you which ones to enable).

After that, navigate to: System Tools > Shared Folders > Open Files. Look for the file in question, right click it and then 'Close Open File'.

Not sure if this works on FreeNAS, but it has worked for me on NetApps in the past.

Thanks. I can confirm that this works in an AD environment.