[OpenAFS-devel] bug: winxp/2k office links bropken in netbios

Noel Burton-Krahn noel@bkbox.com
Tue, 23 Sep 2003 16:47:44 -0700


A perplexing problem:

MS documents with links to excel spreadsheets are broken in WinXP and Win2k.
This happens on 1.2.8a, 1.2.10, and the current CVS.  I'm hacking the
current CVS to see how it happens and how to fix it.

To reproduce it:

1. Create a word document (word.doc) with a hyperlink to an excel doc
(excel.xls) on an AFS drive (U:)
2. Click the link
3. Excel hangs, then complains it can't find "\\noel-afs".  Excel does not
open the document
4. Only Excel triggers this bug.  Other office programs (word, access,
notepad) have no problem

What I think happens:

1. When you click on the link, Word opens Excel with the UNC path
\\noel-afs\home\excel.xls
2. Excel tries to resolve \\noel-afs\ipc$ (I saw that in afsd.log)
3. OpenAFS replies that \\noel-afs\ipc$ does not exist ("bad network name",
see src/winnt/afsd/smd.c:1864)
4. Excel complains that \\noel-afs does not exist.

Trying to fix it:

I tried adding noel-afs to lmhosts.  That worked on my WinXP box, but not
reliably on Win2k

My latest effort is to heal the bug accessing \\noel-afs\ipc$.  I changed
src/winnt/afsd/smd.c to return "access denied" instead of "bad network
name".  Now Excel works, but takes a long time to open files.

Any other ideas?

--Noel













Noel Burton-Krahn
noel@bkbox.com

BKbox - The total remote office solution
http://www.bkbox.com