Run QuickBooks on Linux server?

[Bill Campbell]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2003, Michael Hipp wrote:
>Bill Campbell wrote:
>
>>Has anybody successfully run QuickBooks Professional where the QB data is
>>on a Linux server with the Windows boxen accessing it via Samba?  I have
>>found some articles via google search that say it may be possible by
>>turning on strict locking in Samba, but there still seem to be problems.
>>
>>Disclaimer:  I have very limited experience with QB, preferring to use real
>>accounting software (e.g. multi-user on a stable platform where the authors
>>understand GAAP).
>> 
>>
>My experiences are somewhat dated but perhaps relevant. About 20 months 
>(?) ago I attempted converting the file server of a small-mid-sized 
>manufacturing company near here to a COL 3.1.1 server using Samba. Their 
>main app is QB and they use it heavier than anyone I know. Not long 
>after the conversion they began to get frequent corruption of the QB 
>database. And once we lost 2 days worth of entries due to an 
>unrecoverable data file and faulty backup and had to revert to an older 
>backup.
....
>Note that lots of other companies I support use QB on RH servers - but 
>not nearly as heavily - have no problems whatsoever. It's a size/volume 
>problem AFAICT and probably wouldn't be easy to reproduce. I'd sure like 
>to hear the problem has been solved but I'd proceed cautiously.

Resurrecting an old thread, we've had a customer running samba-2.2.8a on a
SuSE 8.2 Professional system for almost six months now.  They're having
periodic problems where the permissions of the image file get changed so
that new users can't start QB, and fairly frequent locking problems.  The
permissions problems are fairly easy to fix (and I just changed ``create
mask = 0777'' which will hopefully keep QB happy.

The locking problem is more difficult as the only way to fix that I've
found is to restart the samba server.  We're running ``oplocks = No'' and
``strict locking = Yes'' on the QB directory as was recommended on one of
these threads.  The locking problems may be caused by having five users, a
five user limit on QB, and the normal flakiness of Windows connections.

Any suggestions on the locking issues?

Would going to samba3 help?

Bill
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