I've seen a strange problem over the past few days. We have MS Windows 9x/NT users running Excel 97 and Excel 2000. Dozens of minutes, or even hours, after a person stops editing the file (Save & Quit), you can't access the file via NFS or CIFS. CIFS apps complain the file is in use. NFS clients complain with "permission denied". Doing a truss of a chmod or rm on the file shows ERR#13 - EACCES. The only way to "unlock" the file is to have the CIFS user logoff of the client, or to terminate the CIFS session of the Filer. The user clearly does not have any apps open on the CIFS client.

This sounds suspiciously like Windows 9x/NT and Excel is doing something weird to keep the lock open. Has anyone seen this with Excel, and how did they resolve it?

That does sound like an oplock problem. What version of Data ONTAP are you running?

Can you run "cifs stat" on your filer and send me the output? I'm interested in knowing what your OpLkBkNoBreakAck statistic is. You may be suffering from non-responsive oplock breaks. If you disable oplocks (set the cifs.oplocks.enable option off) and the problem goes away, then that's almost certainly the problem.

I suspect a newer version of Data ONTAP will help a lot. In more recent versions there is a knob for working around the non-responsive oplock break problem (a very irritating bug in the Microsoft client).

Matt