Cannot save to network drive

[Veit]

I am running open office 2.3 on MAC OS X. Recently I added a NAS-drive to my network to make our family documents accessible to all our computers at home. Now I hit on a problem into a problem that I simply can't solve. I can access all directories on the drive from all my computers and freely move documents there back and forth. I also can open odt-files from this shared drive and edit them. However, when I want to save them back I get the error message

"Error saving the document <xyz>: General Error.
General input/output error."

I can save it locally on my harddrive and copy it to the NAS-drive afterwards, but that is an ugly way to work. I tried to install open office on the PC of my daughter that runs on Windows XP. From there I could save the file a couple of times but then I got a similar error. Meanwhile I have spent a couple of evenings on the internet already to find explanations or solutions but I was not lucky. I only found some advice that refered to elder versions of open office. The recommendation was to edit the startup script to disable file locking, but I was not able to find this file on the MAC.

Do you have any idea how I could fix this?

[Hagar Delest]

I was not able to find this file on the MAC.

Because of that, I move the thread to the Mac forum, perhaps it will drag some attention from Mac users.
Good luck.

[wurzel]

I am running open office 2.3 on MAC OS X. Recently I added a NAS-drive to my network to make our family documents accessible to all our computers at home. Now I hit on a problem into a problem that I simply can't solve. I can access all directories on the drive from all my computers and freely move documents there back and forth. I also can open odt-files from this shared drive and edit them. However, when I want to save them back I get the error message

"Error saving the document <xyz>: General Error.
General input/output error."

How is your NAS drive mounted in your network ? NFS, Samba (SMB) or AFP ? The error message you are getting has been seen with SMB and NFS mounted drives.

I only found some advice that refered to elder versions of open office. The recommendation was to edit the startup script to disable file locking, but I was not able to find this file on the MAC.

Do you have any idea how I could fix this?

The file locking issue was linked to the use of NFS v3, which had a few implementation problems. It was necessary for each netware client machine to be running the lockd and statd daemons, and sometimes also necessary to edit the startup script as you correctly found from your net search to deactivate file locking which is enabled by default in OOo. On the Mac, you have to look in /Applications/OpenOffice.org 2.3.app/Contents/MacOS, and edit the soffice file in your favorite text editor, and comment out the following lines :



SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING=1
export SAL_ENABLE_FILE_LOCKING


You obviously have to make sure that the NAS disk allows your group of users full write access.
I have no idea whether the AFP protocol has its own quirks or whether OOo X11 even supports this network file protocol.
On Linux machines, there have also been specific issues with SMB and OOo, but most of these seem to depend on the Samba version being used or on the particular Linux distribution (for example, I can not save from OOo to an SMB file share with my KUbuntu distribution, I get some dumb message about incomplete support of the protocol).

Ah yes, one important thing to bear in mind, is that if you get the read/write IO error you mention in your post and that you then close OOo or the file, the original file will be overwritten with 0 bytes of data and therefore you will have destroyed your document. This is not good (an understatement :-/), and really shouldn't be happening, but it doesn't seem to be an important enough issue to be corrected in the dev process. And it is not new, this problem has been around for ages !!!


Alex

[Veit]

Thanks for your input! Meanwhile I have tried a few more things myself, including your proposal to disable the file locking. Here my problem was to find the file "soffice" because it is normally invisible in the Finder. Anyway, this did not solve the problem.

Then I noticed that I can open, edit and save files on any shared directory of my other PCs at home. The only device that did not cooperate was my NAS-drive, which is the MD-250 from Sitecom. So I checked out the website of Sitecom and downloaded the most recent firmware but this still did not work. I think it uses the SMB-protocol but I am not sure about the details.

I simply hate the idea that my computer could win this battle. Now I either have to get used to the idea of having to find workarounds or keep searching for this big flash of insight ...

Veit

[wurzel]

Then I noticed that I can open, edit and save files on any shared directory of my other PCs at home. The only device that did not cooperate was my NAS-drive, which is the MD-250 from Sitecom. So I checked out the website of Sitecom and downloaded the most recent firmware but this still did not work. I think it uses the SMB-protocol but I am not sure about the details.

Look here :

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPo ... 5&SiteID=1

http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPo ... tID=660925

Alex