[OpenAFS] Office hangs on saves

[Jeffrey Altman]

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Kevin Sumner wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm working with a department admin on an issue his Windows users are
> seeing.  Basically, when a user tries to save a document in MS Office,
> the application hangs, as do the mapped AFS drives.  This happens
> randomly, but increasingly more frequently.

Perform an "nbtstat -S" when the problem occurs.  If you see no
connection between the local machine and "AFS", you have triggered a bug
in the Microsoft mrxsmb/rdbss stack.  This problem has gotten worse with
more recent service packs.

> So far, we've tried upgrading AFS from 1.3.77 to 1.5.36

Needless to say that 1.3.77 is ancient and 1.5.36 is ten releases ago.

> and upgrading
> Office from 2003 to 2007.  We've also looked at setting AFS to freelance
> mode, which was already enabled, on the suspicion that Office could be
> trying to stat each directory up the path in AFS, thus trying having to
> contact other cells when it gets into \\afs.  Nothing we've done so far
> has changed either behavior or frequency.

You should read the section on debugging problems in the OpenAFS release
notes.  In particular, read the section on using Process Monitor and
"fs trace".  Doing so will tell you exactly what the application and the
cache manager are up to.  There will be no guessing in the dark.

> To correct the situation, sometimes the user needs to wait a few minutes
> and AFS clears itself up -- other times, a reboot is required.

If the problem is the mrxsmb/rdbss, the connection will reestablish
itself after some apparently random period of time.

If it is something else, like a deadlock in the AFS service, you should
upgrade to the latest release.  1.5.57 implements the all Unicode
interface which has resolved a number of issues with the smb interface.
 Unfortunately it cannot correct for bugs in the microsoft file system
drivers.

If you believe that you have identified a deadlock in the afs service,
use "fs minidump" to produce a  %windir%\temp\afsd.dmp file that can be
analyzed to identify the cause of the problem if one exists.

> Has anybody else experienced this, or even found a solution?  The admin
> and I are looking for other clues, but so far, nothing significant has
> turned up.

The solution is inevitably getting rid of the use of smb.   Peter Scott
and I are working on it.

Jeffrey Altman



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